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| News You Can Use |
July 2008 | Issue 16 |
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| Letter from the Editor: When is a site really successful? |
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When I used to buy online ad space, traffic was always measured in terms of unique visitors. As someone who had to pay for traffic in the form of impressions, I never really agreed with the concept of impressions, or unique visitors.
To me, it seems that it should be more important that people return to your website and spend some time there. If a visitor comes to your site and stays on one page for a second, that is a unique visit. But, they obviously did not find what they were looking for and are not likely to return.
Isn't it more beneficial to your company that people take the time to explore the site, not just one page? That people return to the site because they find the information useful and interesting enough to want to see it again?
It seems that historically, we measure a website's success based upon the number of unique visitors. But is that really a viable measure? What do you think? How do you measure web success?
Katie Birmingham
Newsletter Editor
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Back in May, I told you a little bit about the new Morae 3, scheduled to hit the shelves or, maybe more appropriately, the download scene, in September. What does this new version have to offer loyal users like yourself? Take a gander at our Top 4 New Features...
1. Camera Recording - Conduct focus groups or product research by recording two cameras simultaneously, including DV cameras.
2. Variable speed playback - Review recordings in double time (or faster) while keeping them audible so analysis takes less time.
3. PowerPoint output - Automatically embed videos, graphics and charts into your slides.
4. AutoPilot - Free up facilitators or conduct research at a public kiosk using Autopilot for automatic task and survey delivery.
These are just some of the new features you'll love in Morae 3...stay tuned for more!
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"Every year, millions of Americans sit in movie theaters totally immersed -- the comfortable seats, dark room, and the big screen help viewers forget where they are so they can become absorbed in the moment. At the Michigan State University's Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Lab, researchers are studying the psychological variables, and their physiological signatures, that lead to this sense of telepresence -- the feeling of being in the time and place depicted by the medium."
"...M.I.N.D. Labs are a networked consortium of 11 labs located in universities throughout the United States and Europe. ...A barrier to the type of experimental research the lab conducts is how to synchronize all the moving video elements, gather the psychological and physiological data, boil it down, analyze it quickly, and then deliver results in a meaningful way."
Read the full article to see how M.I.N.D. labs implemented Morae to solve this and other problems.
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Josie Scott,
Senior Usability Specialist |
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The Many Faces of User Experience--the theme of the Usability Professionals' Association's 2008 conference--did indeed let TechSmith's User Experience researchers connect and reconnect with many faces. The weeklong conference, held June 16 through 20 at the Marriot Waterfront located in Baltimore's kitschy Inner Harbor, was highlighted by great speakers, presentations, tutorials, food, and friends, both old and new.
User Experience Manager Barb Hernandez along with Researchers Josie Scott and Casey Wright presented a case study of our two-year effort in mentoring the design of SnagIt 9 through a series of innovation studies. The well-received presentation seemed to earn particular attention for our practices of Agile development using Morae 3 and UserVue and...Post It notes.
In addition, we were able to attend day-long tutorials which included:
- Using games and activities to get feedback from customers and users and collaborate on product design
- Using real world spaces (like Museums) to help design Web spaces
- Innovating new UX practices for Agile development
We met many faces who were there to improve their user experience practice as a part of the eGovernment track. A common thread heard there: usability means accessibility as well.
One of the most talked about events had attendees wearing campaign buttons to support their favorite; authors Steve Krug, Carol Barnum, and Randolph Bias duked it out over the highly charged topic of usability testing by "amateurs." (The conclusion: some testing is better than none, and professionals can help everyone do testing well.) Other presenters shared their experiences mentoring their organizations in better product design. Yet others demonstrated how they gained awareness for their efforts throughout their companies.
Different working styles and processes were shared by all types of practitioners from all sorts of organizations, from corporations to consultancies. There remains a great need for innovation and for qualified User Experience practitioners throughout the world. The international UPA conference is a great place to start.
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Sally Johnson, Technical Communicator |
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Instead of manually calculating data and building graphs, Morae creates graphs to help you share results faster, conduct more testing, and spend more time focused on solving usability issues rather than scrubbing data.
Quantitative data provides hard evidence of usability issues, which complements the qualitative highlight videos. Highlight videos appear more professional and powerful with graphs included to support the qualitative video clips.
This lesson will cover:
- Creating a graph
- Graph analysis examples
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Morae
Usability Testing
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UserVue
Remote User Research
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Logitech QuickCam
Digital Zoom and Pan
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TechSmith Lapel Microphone
High Quality Sound
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Camtasia Studio
Recording and Presentation
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Screencast.com
Media Hosting
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