For those of you who don’t know, a formal usability test involves a person sitting down at a computer and doing predefined tasks on a website and the screen as well as the person being recorded.  We look at how fast it takes to do a task, where they did well, and where the website failed to help the person.  It is a huge eye opener for many. For an overview I recommend Steve Krug‘s fine book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.

So I’ve been doing a major usability project for a client and happily using screenflow for recording my sessions on my MacBook Air.  I really prefer taking the testing to the person’s own environment or at least a neutral environment where they will feel less like a ginea pig and more like just a person using a website, albeit in a structured way.  Let me say that unless you are going to use Morae (which is highly recommendable especially for large scale testing where you want statistically relevant time to completion and failure rates on tasks, although windows only and fairly expensive) I would go with screenflow instead of camtasia. There is at least a couple reasons for this.  One is that recording is super simple, and even on me less-than-super-powered air it never hiccups, slows, or has any problems with recording the WHOLE screen as well as the webcam.  The real beauty of Screenflow though is when it comes time to watch or edit videos.  You can move around the two media sources (the screen and the camera), you can easily zoom in on part of the sceen if you want, make clicks visible and audible, blur parts of the window, change opacity and I’m sure more.  Some of this is possible in Camtasia, but it is really straight forward in screenflow.  The other thing I really like is using it on a mac laptop with built in isight.  It is VERY unobstrusive.  The participant is less likely to be self-conscious, even at the start when most people are without a visible camera pointing at them.  I understand you can even hook up another camera, though I have not attempted to do such.

OK now for the big tip, something I’ve learned which has helped, and would apply to any screen recording: Use a monitor that is larger with higher resolution when reviewing footage and editing video.  This makes it much easier to see al the fine textual details on the screen as well facial expressions that can be very small otherwise.  I do this quickly and easily by plugging in an external monitor, but you could conceivably put them on a share on the computer and open it through the network or copy it, though these are large files and that would be cumbersome and tiring.

I like to take notes as I watch, and taking notes on an open document one the smaller sceen is a nifty way to keep it all there, plus I type much faster than I can write by hand.

That is all for now, carry on.