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| News You Can Use |
Nov 2008 | Issue 20 |
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As most of you know, World Usability Day took place earlier this month with the theme of transportation. As part of this theme, you could take part in the Global Transport Challenge, where you could:
- MEASURE your everyday transportation usage
- MONITOR your personal carbon travel footprint and compare yourself to others around the world
- MINIMIZE your energy usage through alternative transportation choices, carbon offsets, and simple travel changes thereby maximizing the impact on our world.
The challenge was officially on November 13, 2008 but it looks like you can still participate.
You will receive information on how to make small changes that will have a big impact on your carbon footprint. You just fill out 4 quick questions on the mode of transportation you use and how much, only takes a few minutes.
Katie Birmingham
Newsletter Editor
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| News: World Usability Day at Michigan State University |
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TechSmith was proud to sponsor World Usability Day (WUD) for the third consecutive year. Many staff members attended the WUD event at Michigan State University, hosted by the Usability & Accessibility Center. It was a full day of sessions covering topics from how to do a usability test to evaluating the usability of package design. One of the most interesting sessions focused on the future of accessibility.
Mike Paciello gave a presentation titled "Is Third Wave Accessibility a Panacea? The Next Black Swan?" It focused on a future vision for accessibility. The major takeaway is that many standards organizations are aligning their accessibility standards into a common core. Mr. Paciello suggests that this will have wide-reaching ramifications for software and web developers because there will be a single set of accessibility standards to develop against. This also means that it will be easier to test accessibility to ensure products meet the standards. Many companies will need to begin testing for accessibility or risk being sued if their software and web sites don't provide universal access to all. Target settled such a case earlier this year.
Another interesting session focused on how usability is an important component of the State of Michigan's Department of Information Technology. Ken Theis, Chief Information Officer for the State of Michigan described how the department is incorporating usability and user centered design early on in the development process for new projects. This is especially important in the current economic climate of budget shortfalls. The state wants to leverage IT projects to deliver government services using less resources. Usability is considered a critical component of this initiative. In fact, the Department of Transportation is already incorporating usability and is being used as a model for other departments.
TechSmith's own User Experience Researchers conducted a hands-on session of how to conduct a usability test. The attendees were split into groups and each group was given a laptop. The group took on roles of a participant, facilitator and observers to learn how an actual user test works. It really helped attendees understand the process.
World Usability Day is a great opportunity to raise awareness around the world about usability issues and we look forward to supporting future World Usability Day events.
Did you participate in World Usability Day? Tell us about it.
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Jerome Ryckborst |
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This month, Jemore Ryckborst, a CUA and the user-experience manager at Gemcom Software International, shared with me how he is using Morae 3.
Q: How do you use Morae?
I use it mainly for formative testing—to help us identify problems in time to fix them before release—and some summative testing—to verify that we fixed a problem on our most critical features.
I either have participants come in or, more likely, I throw my laptop in my bag with the camera and headset, and travel to customer sites. I have several different user groups and only some of them are located in cities. We make software for the mining industry, so most of our users are in remote locations, on every continent, and I don't visit as many of them as I'd like. I've been to mines in Canada and Australia, but that's all my travel budget permits.
To address this, I trained our product managers in basic usability-test facilitation, and they use Morae Recorder to conduct usability-test sessions with the scenarios and consent form that I provide. They send me the recordings on CD—these remote locations inevitably have poor Internet connections—and I then analyze them in Morae Manager. I realize some practitioners might cringe at the thought of getting direct user data this way, by amateur facilitators and two weeks in the mail, but this is how we've solved the problem.
Without Morae, I would get no data.
I am looking forward to trying the new feature that lets me record two cameras at once—one on the user's face and one on the paper prototype. This means I can start collecting video to share with developers much earlier in the process. I haven't done this yet, but I'm just itching to try. I want (!) that video recording because we don't have a lab with one-way glass on site, so video is a convincing way to show developers the impact of a design or performance problem.
Q: What is your favorite feature in Morae 3?
This will sound like an advertisement, but: Morae 3 lets me work faster. Hurdles have been removed. For example, I can listen to recordings at more than 100% of the actual speed, so it's much faster to analyze them. My limit is 1.7 of actual speed, but I've heard some people can listen to their recordings at 2.0 of actual speed. There are a few other time-saving improvements in the timeline, very subtle, very nice. It's all about saving me time, helping me to work faster.
For the sake of balance, I'd like you to mention that there are things that I'd like to see improved further. Everyone has their personal wish list, of course. I'll accept anything that helps me work faster or that simplifies the UI and makes it easier to learn—because I believe that most practitioners use Morae intensively in short bursts, so each time we must relearn the product. I'm looking forward to whatever refinements the team comes up with next.
What do you think of Morae 3?
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Back in August, we featured a roundtable discussion which focused on the future of usability testing. The group discussed three questions:
- Why is usability important?
- What are the barriers to usability design and testing?
- How should it be imbedded into all phases of development?
As a follow up, another usability roundtable was completed last month. This time, the discussion focused on how to design and test for usability. To explore this topic, Peter Abrahams, who chaired, asked four questions, which break down the discussion into more manageable chunks:
- How to collect usability requirements?
- How to design for usability?
- What usability testing is needed?
- How to run usability testing?
The roundtable was made up of people from academia, large enterprise, web development, internet psychology, journalism and usability testing.
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Sally Johnson, Information Developer |
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This month, it's a double-dose of Sally. She has put together some great tutorials on the Word add-in and PowerPoint output for Morae 3. Both make it a snap to create reports and presentations highlighting study results.
Easily take your test results from Morae Manager into your PowerPoint presentation with the PowerPoint output. Show off your story boards, graphs, video clips and more that will help you get your point across quickly and effectively.
The Morae Add-In for Word provides access to the most important elements of a Morae Manager project, right within Word. Quickly add project components into your reports. Choose a Morae project from the Morae Task Pane, and add any of the following:
- Study configuration options including task definitions and success score scales, study and task instructions, marker definitions and scores, and survey definitions
- Project information including task definitions and success score scale, study and task instructions, marker definitions and scores surveys, graph data tables, and graphs
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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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