Requirements for the sessions
We have a few hard requirements that I think are worth mentioning when you’re conducting remote research. Let’s dig into these:
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You’ll need an absolutely superb internet connection. This is something you simply cannot compromise. You’re doing remote user research via high-quality video calls with possibly screen sharing.
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You need to find a calm, silent environment. This can be a meeting room or a lockable office room. Your remote research is just like conducting an interview in person: make sure your environment is quiet and you won’t be disturbed.
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Good quality headphones and a microphone. You want to hear your research participant well and you want them to hear you well. The built-in laptop/computer audio and microphone is not an option for professional user interviews. Invest in a proper set of headphones and a microphone and be rewarded with far higher-quality tests.
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If this is your first time running a user interview in your current environment, make sure everything works by testing your setup before your first session starts. You don’t want your headphones to stop working half-way through a session/interview because you haven’t used them for months and they’ve run out of battery! We highly recommend taking a pre-call test within Engage to ensure everything is working correctly.
Plan ahead
You need to get your research plan and your prototypes sorted. In other words, you need to decide what you’re looking to learn and how you’re going to uncover this. You’ve probably run user interviews or at least user testing sessions, so you have an idea of what to do here. If not, this is a good read.
Spectator/Note-taker
We recommend coming to the remote sessions with an extra person in the call, to be the spectator. This could be a designer, product manager or programmer, for example. Having this person attend saves time because the spectator can take notes instantly (saving you from having to listen to the whole recordings again). Having an extra person also provides an extra pair of eyes on the session. This is especially useful later on when you’re reviewing the insights of your research
Engage's Spectator feature allows your team members to watch your sessions live. Spectators can't talk, chat or interrupt the session in any way.
Reschedule, cancellation, no-show
You’re working with people and they’re just being human: they’re late; they turn up early; they reschedule; they cancel at short notice, or sometimes don’t even show up at all. We're doing everything we can to minimize issues like these. The sooner you learn to handle these situations, the less annoying it’ll be.
We have collected a few useful points to help you improve the show-up rate.