Spotlight on Peter Hughes

Catalyst Group Design

Peter Hughes, founder and principal consultant of Catalyst Group Design, has 13 years of experience in marketing, interface evaluation, design and specification. Currently, Hughes' work focuses on the development of online techniques and processes to improve the commercial effectiveness of Web sites. Prior to forming Catalyst, Peter was a senior consultant at The Hiser Group in Australia, where he founded its Web-based usability consulting services.

Their goal as a company is to make their clients' Web sites and applications as simple and as useful as possible so they perform measurably better. In order to help them in this task, they use Morae.

Hughes said, “There are two main reasons that we use Morae. One, the ease of doing it, and two, the razor-sharp quality of the recordings.”

This is in contrast to their previous system. He said, “We were using a digital video-based system, so by the time we mixed it and put it on tape, there was always an element of fuzziness. There's just no way you could capture perfect resolution on tapes using those products.” The tapes themselves also posed a problem. After a testing session, the clients would take the tapes home, or Hughes would ship them…because 10-20 VHS tapes tended to be bulky and heavy. In addition, many of the clients didn't have the right type of equipment in their offices, so there was the added hassle of getting a player. It was more cumbersome to set up, and due to the format, they couldn't provide perfect quality.

Hughes said, “We can now give our clients - almost instantly - very high quality video which they can play on standardized equipment, like a laptop. The clients get the benefit of something that's easy to watch, of high quality, and they get a max of two DVDs for an entire test session…rather than suitcase full of tapes.”

In Catalyst's business, clients come to them with problems or issues. With Catalyst's independent input, a client arguing a case for change will have the report and videos to back him up. Hughes said, “When we record razor-sharp images of the interface and what the user is doing, there's no question of what’s going on. The thing that is just fantastic is that we can give our clients the DVDs within 30 minutes of the last test session. They love it!”

Catalyst uses Morae for every type of testing scenario they perform. They use it for standard lab-based tests, and because it's a portable set up, they use it in other locations, like their clients' customers' offices.

“In other words, we just pack it up and take it into the conference room, in several offices around a city in a day,” Hughes said.

They perform remote testing when participants aren't able to be in the same physical location, and they also can work internationally. “The great thing about a laptop is that all you need overseas is a plug adaptor. We were testing in Japan and the UK last year, and it was a breeze,” he said.

Hughes explained that even a client developing a suite of handheld-based products asked them to review the content. Hughes said, “Since Morae is the foundation of our testing system, I was keen to find a way to integrate the method of testing handhelds and PDAs.” As a result, they figured out how it could be done. They used the Logitech Notebook Pro webcam to record the handheld screen, used the video monitor software Watcher to take the video signal and put it on the screen, and used Morae to record the screen.

“We were surprised with the quality we could achieve with inexpensive components,” he said.

Hughes finds a main argument for their Morae use is that it's applicable to every usability testing circumstance. He said, “I particularly love that we can continue using Morae for all the testing that we do. We've been using this platform for months, and since we can use different configurations of those core components, we can essentially ‘pack the same suitcase’ when we go traveling. That's really the key point - right across the board, the same platform enables us to do all the testing scenarios we need.”

“Plus,” he added, “we don't have to implement a different system when we train consultants – we can train them all at once. Having one system is great, because it makes our life simpler.”

“There's very little we can't do, and our clients haven't had any questions for which we haven't been able to provide answers,” he finished.