So one thing that I know people are interested in is software that's available for you to run usability
tests.
And I wanted to show you some various desktop software that's available.
I'm not going to be talking in this section about websites that will run usability tests for you.
I'll be covering those in other lectures here specifically I'm thinking that you're in the position
where you're going to run a lab based study.
You want to record the screen and the video the participant you know what software is available for
you to do that.
So the first one I wanted to mention to you is a piece of software from an organization called Tech
Smith and it's called morais.
It's not cheap.
It's about 2000 or so dollars.
But I think it could be even more than that.
Fifteen hundred pounds.
But on the screen at the moment you can see the address where you could go to find out more about it
although it's expensive.
It's kind of a de facto standard that professionals in the field of use of testing use.
And I wanted to give you some idea of why that was.
So first of all the thing you need to know about morei is that it has three separate components in the
same way that Microsoft office has got Microsoft Word Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft Excel you know
three different programs to do three different things.
Morais is similar to that in fact but it's got three very different components to it.
So the first one is called The record morei Recorder.
Now this is an example of morei a recorder.
And what you can see here is the ability to set up a study.
So this is the first screen that you come to to set up a usability test where you're able to do here
is enter details to do with the usability test itself.
These are the kind of things that you would have had in your usability test plan such as the details
of the tasks the data logging markers that you're interested in.
You can also add a survey that you give to people either at the end of a task or at the end of a session.
So that's one element of your study that you set up with morei Recorder and another area here is to
do with the recording itself and you have the ability here to make certain changes to the recording.
So for example you can determine what's recorded when you run the study.
So do you want to record the screen video with the picture in picture for example.
And also when you're doing that do you want to highlight the mouse.
So for example if you have selected that in the video when you make a recording there will be a kind
of a yellow highlight around the mouse cursor.
The participant won't see this during the study but you'll see it when you play it back and let's use
it because sometimes the mouse cursor can be hidden.
Anyway that's the first component of it.
I use this to set up your study.
If I was going to run a usability test now I click the red button and you can see there's a picture
in picture here.
This is me speaking to you and this is the screen that would be recorded.
And that's the thing that does all of the heavy lifting in terms of actually recording the screen and
the participant to voice and so on.
Well let's quit from Maura recorder and then let me show you another component of morais and that's
called morei observer.
And this is morei observe the way this works is let's say you have people in another room that want
to observe the usability test in progress but they can do that with Morrie observe what this does is
it sets up a connection with the memory recall the software and then youre able to watch the video from
another room or actually from anywhere in the country so long as you can get access to that same network
through a land for example.
And what youre also able to do here is grade graded out at the moment because we dont have a connection
in place.
But if I was connected to another computer which was running more recorder These would be visible.
And you can see here that I can add certain logs to the logging marks to the recording itself so I could
be observing the test and thinking oh that's interesting.
I want to put down that a usability error occurred or it's a particular observation that I've made and
you can add your code and it there's a set of default code that you can see that have come with the
observer you can change those in morrow recorder and produce whatever code you want.
So that's more a preserve That's the second component of these three that I mentioned.
Now the third one and really this is the one that you pay all of the money for when it comes to buying
morei is morei manager morais manager is basically the tool which allows you to do three things you
can analyze the data you can create graphs.
Of the data that you've collected and you can also produce highlight to videos of the data that you've
come up with.
So you might want to produce a five minute clip showing the points where your user struggled in a certain
area of the of the interface.
And it's a fairly powerful method of putting those video clips together.
However if you just want to make video clips of usability tests this isn't the software to buy powerful
though it is because what the morei manager allows you to do is a lot more than just produce video clips.
Well look at other software in a moment that also allows you to do video clips and it's a lot cheaper
if that's what you're after then.
Dont buy more because it's too expensive just to produce videos.
What it does allow you to do though is do certain kinds of analysis so you can see these these coloured
markers along the bottom here.
These are all of the markers that were added during the usability test session.
And I can just jump to one of those for example here.
But another thing that it does and this is for me this is like magic.
It's like you know I think this is quote from is it Arthur C. Clarke who said that any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Well I don't understand how this works.
To me it's fantastic.
One thing that I'm able to do is I can search through the recordings of this usability test.
So let's say for example I want to know that this particular test is to do with downloading software
and running it let's say I want to find anywhere in the video where the word run appeared with a dialogue
box.
The Microsoft dialogue box that comes up and says Do you want to run this program save it to disk and
so on.
I can show you how you can search for it in the software Let me show you how you do it.
I'm going to click on this option here called screen text in these select markers.
I want to choose modify here and I'm going to turn up the word run because I know that peers on the
dialogue box that I'm trying to try to find and now what it's giving me here is a series of search results.
If I jump to the search results you'll be able to see happen is that it goes.
It can be just open up there so we can see what it's done is found the word run appearing in the video.
How did it do that.
I don't know.
It's like magic but it does a label you two very quickly jump to certain parts of the video that youre
interested in and that enables you to very quickly find parts of the video that you can use to show
the design team and that you can have a look at afterwards.
Now for me I absolutely love data and if I have got one hour of usability test video I'll happily spend
three or four hours analysing it you know producing a very poor complete data log looking for things
that I didn't see during the usability test itself.
And if you are data freak like analyzing data.
Then this is the software for you.
It allows you to go to incredible depth to find that.
So I recommend morei Text Miss morei for that particular purpose.
It's a really useful tool for doing in-depth analysis of usability tests.
Here's another piece of software that you might want to consider.
This would be appropriate for you first of all if your software runs on a Mac.
And secondly if your main aim is to produce highlights videos if that's the case then this particular
application alters your feedback is a great piece of software that you could use in order to do that.
It's very cheap.
I think it's about 70 dollars and its main aim is to be able to record usability test sessions.
So let's create a new test session.
And what we're going to do is run a usability test.
They had a low of you to me or something.
And what I'm able to do here is create a participant as you can see that's me on the right hand side.
I'm going to be the participant and were able to collect those sessions together.
So let me start a session now.
So I am now going to carry out a quick usability test of the website So here we are on the usually home
page.
It's a great course here by the way.
You've not done that yet.
I highly recommend it.
Terrific value and you'll learn a lot.
So anyway so we would then do our usability test of you to me then what I'm going to do is actually
stop your back record.
Now you can see the video on the right hand side and we can preview that what do we do now is I'll stop
talking for a second and quickly preview it.
We are going to carry out a quick little test you to me.
Website's home page so you can see it's a very quick way to produce a video of your usability test.
You can then save and export all of your recordings.
But also if you have an Apple TV remote that works with your Mac what you're able to do is to do two
things.
First of all you can indicate which task you're on by pressing the fast forward button and the second
thing that you can do as you can add markers to the system.
So if something interesting happens you can press a button on your Apple Remote and that adds a marker
to the file.
Then after which you can export the elements of the video which happened around the time of those markers
However you can't do any kind of more sophisticated analysis of the data.
So if your aim is to really dive into the data and analyse those videos to death.
So that's not a great solution for that is really for people that want to quickly get highlights videos
that they can share with the design team.
So we talked about some expensive software more which enables you to do not just video recordings of
sessions but carry out the very in-depth analysis.
We've talked about it much cheaper software which allows you which was silver back and that allows you
to just produce the video recordings so the highlights videos have sessions.
Here's another piece of software.
It's free.
So it's certainly worth getting.
It's called the usability test data logger.
And it was developed by someone who's interviewed on this course.
Todd Zazzle and Chuck.
Now it doesn't allow you to produce videos of usability tests.
That's not what it's about what it's about is helping you analyze the data or collect the data from
a usability test.
So let's have a look at this spreadsheet and I can show you what it what it's about.
First thing you need to know is it contains macros.
So you need to enable the macros in order to get this spreadsheet to work.
So then let's open this software up and this screen up and then you'll be able to see see what's going
on.
So this is the first page of it so for example you can define your your project.
For example let's call it magic the magic shop test.
And the research it will be me.
And we can also define our participants here.
So let's we've got a couple of Pilar participants I'll ignore those for now but let's put in a participant
I'll call them Harry her Miami and ahead week.
We're going to just have the three participants for now.
We also can indicate the scoring system that we're going to use on our test.
So for example after the completion completion of each test will we say that the task was completed
easily of medium.
Medium well that's like a steak isn't it.
Or was it hard.
And whether or not the participant to secede or whether a participant failed the test and then we can
classify that according to whether it was a pass or fail.
Also there's a description of that too.
Now let's put the other thing that we can we can add here is a certain tasks so let's have a first task
let's say it's shop for a while and second task is register for an account.
Our third task might be purchase warned for one might be sign up for newsletter.
And we don't need to properly.
And I wanted to put a news letter.
Maybe there's a newsletter.
Who knows.
So now what I can do is if I jump over to a first participant remember this person's name was Harry.
You can see that listed here on the form what I can do now is to preserve the test in progress.
And after that when Harry starts his usability test or click on the start time here this is going to
count start timing the session for us you can see there's a clock that's running here that's telling
me how long that how is taking on the task.
I will then wait for Harry to complete the task and then when he's completed the task Oh click on stop
time.
If I go into the time area here and there you can see 18 is 18 seconds.
It is enabled there for me to add in to the data log itself.
And I can also indicate a score.
So did Harry complete that with easy medium or hard for him.
Did he need an assist or did he felt the task.
Let's say that it was media.
And I can also add some observations.
So for example the his he didn't use didn't you search during during the study.
And I can do that for the other sections as well.
And obviously there's a tab here for each of the participants we have.
So here we are on hedwig's tab.
Now we don't have very extensive data here to show you.
But one thing that you're able to do as well with a data logger is to is to plot various tasks of the
usability tests.
So for example here we've just got the one bar here because we've only got the one participant and it
shows that participant was 100 percent successful.
But there's other charts as well here that you can have.
Is also at the end a list of observations that are collected together.
For example you can see here this she collects together all the observations that you make and there
is a final tap here which enables you to print various forms out like task cards and satisfaction questionnaires
and so on.
Now it's a great piece of software.
It's a fantastic use of Excel.
You wouldn't believe what Todd has managed to make Excel do here and it's free.
As I've mentioned.
But also notice at the bottom if you do use it and you find it useful then you can donate some money
to encourage you to do so.
He's obviously put a lot of work in in this particular spreadsheet and it's extremely valuable.
So if you use it in your own usability test then please donate something to Todd.
Now as I've mentioned it doesn't do the usability test videos.
But remember in some ways you know the video is a bit of a cargo cult element for a usability test it's
not really about the videoing It's about the data that you collect.
And so what the data logger here does is it enables you to collect very rich data.
In fact I've often run usability tests and I've not had any videos or recordings of the sessions at
all.
I've simply got a data log of what went on and that's often enough to collect great data.
So I encourage you to play around with the usability data logger and maybe use it in your own study.