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This summer, Fog Creek Software, a New York software development company, charged four summer interns with creating a new software product. They were responsible for designing, programming, testing, and rolling out a complete software product in ten weeks.

They created Fog Creek Copilot SM - a program that allows people to help friends, relatives, and customers fix computer problems by connecting to their computers over the Internet.

And how did they get fast test results on Fog Creek Copilot's usability? Morae!

TechSmith, the official sponsor of the usability testing, sent staff to the Fog Creek Software offices in Manhattan to help with the test.

They paired up 14 people into computer 'victims' and 'helpers'. Only one of them had ever used Fog Creek Copilot.

The victims were having a computer problem for which they needed the helper's assistance. One, they needed to know how to change their Internet homepage. Two, they needed to change their default printer.

The victim called the helper, who would direct the victim to www.copilot.com. The helper would then take control of the victim's screen and make the necessary changes. He would talk on the phone at the same time, explaining his onscreen steps.

Since Morae records all audio, video, and the screen, the developers could see and hear exactly where the users had problems.

View the Reactions Video

View the Best Features Video

View the Issues Video

After a day of testing, the developers had valuable video to analyze, and a list of issues they needed to address. Ultimately, they made certain links more obvious to the user, added prompts, improved the downloading instructions, added more explanation to the purchasing page, and included more instructions in the program-generated e-mail.

Intern Yaron Guez said, "The usability test was really successful ... The Techsmith Morae software proved to be very useful. Seeing both users' screens on two side-by-side LCD monitors, with video and audio of both users was very cool, especially when the users were talking to each other over the phone ... By the end of the day we had learned a ton about Fog Creek Copilot. Issues that we never would have thought would be issues were unearthed, and I have a huge list of things to implement this week to make the service better."

Fog Creek Software founder Joel Spolsky added, "Morae is really an incredible tool and a huge money saver over the traditional usability lab approach. We had a great time and we could never have done such a professional usability test on a reasonable budget without Morae."