Usability Reflections: Remote Research

Disclaimer: Although I did include my personal choice as to which service I’d use in my assignment submission, I’ve omitted that here since I don’t know that an arm-chair assessment of either of the companies’ services is fair. I’ve just listed the apparent pros and cons based on my brief observations.

The Contenders

ethnio

Ethnio has a well-defined and well-communicated product offering, shows you exactly what you get and what the user will see, and all around does a fantastic job of marketing their services.

Pros

• Site design has personality and quickly communicates the purpose of the company
• Explicitly mentions “recruiting usability test participants” as one of the company’s offerings
• Landing page shows what both you and the users get, i.e., owner’s dashboard and “would you like to participate” request screenshots
• Selection pool consists of your actual customers

Cons

• Fixed monthly cost means that you’re paying a set amount each month (there are usage tiers depending on page views)
• Interrupting workflows might annoy some visitors

Bonus Points

Digging around on their website, I found a super-clever use of CSS to make a scalable curly brace representation:

Amazon Mechanical Turk

From what I could glean from the site, Mechanical Turk¹ effectively operates as a human work load-balancer—feed work in one end and it distributes it across an N-node human worker network.

Pros

• Name recognition via Amazon branding
• Similar cost model to AWS means it’s likely a more cost-effective solution
• Since it’s designed as a human PaaS², you can BYOT—Bring Your Own Test
• Active selection by participants means potentially quicker filling of slots

Cons

• Relatively spartan design is unfocused and does not quickly communicate its purpose
• Their members may not be representative of your target users

Footnotes:

1. Thanks to one of my classmates for identifying the etymology of the name Mechanical Turk.
2. PaaS: Platform As A Service.