Continuing my thoughts on the growing field of UX and the tools that we use in powering our user research. I understand that everyone has a budget and you want to make the dollar stretch as far as you can, however, are you doing your research justice if you use a tool, for example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk? Just because it’s very cheap and you can get a large pool of participants for your user research are you getting the right data that you need to make the right decisions to make your product the very best it can be? Or is simply good enough is what you’re going after? These are a few questions you may want ask yourself when conducting your research and when is the right time to get the right participants for the critical tasks and problems you’re trying to validate. Don’t get me wrong I’m all about maximizing my budget, however I would rather do something once and get it done right vs. having to explain to my stakeholders why I need additional funds to do the same research over again and have them lose confidence in me doing the study and the UX process as many stakeholders in the real world are not exposed or familiar with it at all in the first place.
So keep this in mind when you are out there looking for a website to help you with face to face or remote user research to find the right tool and company to aid you in this process. Ethnio website and their customers that they have whom all have used their tool gives me great confidence in the data that I would gain from their tool. This would help me in my report to all stakeholders, and when many of them want to learn or watch the process, I feel tools and website such as Ethnio would provide validation of the UX process to the business.
