A Study On Remote User Research Method And Tool With Context-awareness

Today, ICT (information and communication technology) products are becoming more and more important in people's daily life and work. However, products'user experience determines their competitiveness to a large extent, which asks usability professional staff to do a lot of user research. Traditional user experience research is to gather information of user behavior manually in a laboratory environment or in real context of using products. This is not only a waste of human and financial resources, but also having low efficiency and getting the data which is not comprehensive. Remote user research methods break the limit that usability professionals and users must carry out research at the same time and the same place, but it is easy to lose control of the experiment. Remote user research with context-awareness methods owns the feature of context-awareness. Considering that the user can accept this method, it facilitates usability professional staff's research to support its further design and assessment.People always carry mobile phones and mobile phones with high intelligence, multi-sensor are becoming a prominent trend. It allows phone to become context aware, on the other hand, usability professionals can access information of user behavior characteristics indirectly through a mobile phone. Thus, this study selected mobile phone as the user terminal and computer as the usability staff terminal for remote user research design with context-awareness.This research work is divided into five stages:literature review, requirement analysis, tool design, iterative improvement, technology implementation and prototype case studies. Each stage of the study includes:(1) literature review phase:compared and summarized several remote data collection methods; (2) requirement analysis phase: used questionnaire survey, focus groups, task analysis and other methods to identify t three situational factors, established a typical scenario, and verified the functional features; (3) design and prototype testing phases:based on literature review and requirement analysis in the early phases, did the prototype design including conceptual design, interaction design and visual design, and did iterative improvements through usability testing; (4) technological prototype implementation phase:use Android mobile phone as the user terminal, and desktop as the usability staff terminal, partially implemented the functions of the tool; (5) case study phase:in order to assist usability professionals study how users use the mobile shopping assistant (MSA, mobile shopping assistant, a mobile phone application), the user research work involved the tool and carrying out case studies. Testing results showed that on the premise of users' acceptance, remote user research tool with context-awareness can bring usability researchers more user information with high efficiency, thus, it can provide convenience for the usability staff.