Remote usability evaluations using the internet

Remote evaluation methods are a means to detect usability issues without bringing users into a laboratory. This peper presents a brief survey of remote evaluation methods and discusses some benefits and challenges among the methods. The goal of this paper is to evaluate remote evaluation methods according to the point in a design cycle that thay are most useful, the type of data they can yield, and the degree that a method can detect and shed light on usability issues. The most important measure of a method is Its ability to identify usability issues in a given design. When compared to laboratory evaluations, some remote methods show promise in highly correlated task times and task completion rates on the same application. Two basic questions are: what kind of usability issues can you expect to find with various methods and how can you best use each one?