What technologies do you use in user research? How do you best leverage these technologies? As part of a panel discussion, Amy Jones discussed Morae and UserView. Their strengths and weaknesses were covered as well as the impact they had on the research findings, with the clients, and with the designers. From a panel discussion at the April 2010 Austin UPA meeting

1. Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together Morae & Uservue

2. The Situation B2B (actually B2NP) model SaaS ~9,000 users at 1200 organizations A few in Austin, most not

3. The Recruiting A survey of all users has yielded a group of ~300 folks interested in usability testing For a given project, send out a survey assessing profile and availability Follow up with the best candidates and schedule a time via email

4. The Testing Session UserVue: Easy for the tester to set up – just click a link Recordings are already Morae-readable files Allows observers to connect without interacting with the tester Cons Works only with PC, launches IE browser UserVue is going away sometime this year

5. The Analysis Using Morae, review recordings and create video clips Morae allows variable speed reviewing (up to 4x ‘realtime’) Easy to control the playback, go back, mark as clips Essentially clip the entire thing, and then re-assemble them as storyboards for export to PowerPoint or stand-alone video files

6. The Presentation Present to development team Many of them will have been observers for one or more tests Seeing 5 30-second clips strung together of 5 different people having the same problem is incredibly powerful Morae also supports graphs and chart slides, and surveys built in to the tests. I rarely use these in presentations.