Usability software recommendations?

[Sarah McMaster]

Can anyone recommend a usability testing / screen recording software they particularly like? And, alternately, any to avoid? Many Thanks

[Andrew Grohowski]

We have used Morae in the past. Did the job for us.

[Megan Dushin]

Here at the U of MN we have access to Adobe Connect web conferencing software. It's not intended for usability testing, but we used it locally to record a usability test so that we could see what the user did and how they responded to the tasks - and then we could refer back to it if we missed something or wanted to show stakeholders what happened. We logged into the computer as 'presenter', shared the browser application on the screen, and had the user do the test on that machine, with the camera pointing to their face. Then of course, we recorded it. That way we could see both what they did in response to the questions and what facial expressions they had.

 

We were thinking Connect would be good for remote testing to broaden our testing sphere to outside the Twin Cities area, but it turned out to work nicely locally. We haven't yet used it remotely, having someone in another part of the state/region/country test the site using Connect.

 

It's free, so that was nice! And we referred back to it a few times.

 

Megan

Institute on Community Integration, ici.umn.edu

College of Education and Human Development, cehd.umn.edu

[Anita Schaepe]

We have used both Camtasia, and more recently Silverback, from which we could make QuickTime movies of the recording. This gives plenty of feedback information and offers flexibility in how you want to use it.

[Sarah McMaster]

Thanks Andrew, Megan, and Anita for the recommendations!