Moderated User Testing is a useful way for testers to work with users who are not in the same location as themselves. There are certain challenges, such as passing on incentives, but at the same time there are enormous benefits, such as being able to reach testers globally.
For the tester, videotaping the session is essential. Moderated user testing can capture facial expressions and user quotes, but it is often challenging to read and assess all of that in real time.
One drawback is that appointments need to be made to run the test. This isn’t an asynchronous experience, in other words. Scheduling something with a remote tester can be challenging, and in certain projects one might find that you have a lot of no shows. So, this could have the challenge of being time consuming.
But, once everything is captured, even with a small subset of users, one can gain quite a lot of feedback, particularly attitudinal feedback. Moderate user testing is also useful in that it allows for the correlation of attitudinal feedback and behavioral feedback.