I’m totally projecting here, but there have got to be users — or people who are like your users — somewhere nearby. Even though your sites are business to business, there’s a human there somewhere. There might be someone just down the hall from you who fits, or comes close. Can you give us an example?

Dana

Do the participants need to be familiar with the website? For usability testing, as opposed to contextual research, you could try people who are business professionals from other fields to get a sense of the navigation and “findability” of information. Coffee shops are a great place to find business people, particularly at lunch or just before work. For quick and dirty, the perfect user isn’t necessary. Closely related backgrounds and level of PC/Internet experience will still give you results to inspire design solutions.

Samantha

I generally try to shoot for five users per round of usability testing, but if I see the first three all have exactly the same issues and I’m under pressure to return the results quickly, I’ll stop there and collect my thoughts, make a quick PowerPoint or Word doc and be done with it.

One of my favorite ways to present data is in Visio. Just thought bubbles right where the problems are… works well when there are many detail issues to resolve, as opposed to wholistic design changes.

Saul Greenberg and I just finished submitting a paper to the Journal of Usability Studies on a technique I used successfully with a colleague at a major Photographic show. Here’s hoping it gets accepted because when I did the research on this I found almost nothing for published material, even though based on the two links above, others have successfully done it.

The underlying theme here is that you don’t need great tools to eye-track, record mouse-clicks, etc. E.g. If you see a 20-something lean in to a screen on a website to read text, signs are pretty good your fonts are way too small. You can find out basic, valuable information in 5 minutes of questions and no budget.

There are lots of ways to find participants for studies. If you’re sure you want current customers (rather than people who might be new to the site), you can try some things that I’ve seen work for my clients:

- Request that a link be put on the site that invites people to sign up to take part in user research (it might send them to an email that goes to you or to a small questionnaire that gathers contact information and then you can call them later). This has the advantage that people have opted in. If it’s in a place on the site that people have to log in to use, you know they are already customers.

- Hang out at a large branch (if your bank has branches) and ask people who are standing in line if they would like to participate in a short research session that will help the bank serve them better. Work with the bank manager to make sure he or she is comfortable with you doing this. You could even do short sessions right there in the branch if everyone is good with that.

- Ask bankers in branches to help you recruit people who are opening accounts. Take the bankers out for coffee to thank them.

If you have a couple of weeks before conducting your usability test, you might think about using personal and professional networks to help you find participants. Posting to craigslist.org might also work well, if you word the ad carefully.

I don’t recommend getting customer lists from the client for two reasons. First, most banks have privacy policies that customers have agreed to that prevent customers from being contacted for anything but doing specific business. Second, the contact information — even at banks! — can be woefully out of date.