Explore Morae

My wife and I have been spending a lot of time on real estate sites, trying to find our dream home. Many listings link to a "virtual tour" showing 360 degree views of certain rooms in the house. Cool!

Except that about half of these virtual tours require my personal information before I get to see the photos. Uncool. The last thing I need is desperate seller agents spamming my inbox.

At first, I walked away from those listings just to punish the people who designed such a stupid system. Now I do the smarter thing and fill them out like this:

A few months back, we came across a fascinating blog post by Russ Wilson, VP of product design at software firm NetQoS. In this post, Russ shared loads of details about how his team is doing usability testing at conferences and tradeshows.

Here's the beauty of the idea: your marketing department is already paying to attend these conferences!

For a small additional investment (Russ puts it just north of $6,000) you can set up a testing room right on the show floor and do sessions with dozens of participants in just a couple of days. Now that's smart thinking!

A few unexpected benefits of testing at conferences:

• It's easy to recruit participants (and booth staff can help!)
• The conference-floor meeting room may be included in your booth fee
• Testing can generate additional sales
• You're likely to impress potential customers by the very act of testing
  

In our exclusive interview, Russ gives some additional details about how NetQoS is doing usability testing. He also shares Six Tips for Testing at Conferences to help you hit a home run the first time you try it!

David Travis is at it again. The London-based usability consultant previously wrote an article showing how to use Morae for heuristic evaluation. Now he's written one titled Paper Prototyping with Morae.

In the article, Travis shows how Morae software, a camcorder, and a webcam can be used together to make paper prototyping much more feasible.

His setup eliminates the need for two usability experts, two rooms, and at least two hours spent editing video tape! Check it out...

Sometimes the strongest approach to "selling" your services is to lay out an objective case based on the best numbers available...then illustrate with a story of past successes.

In this guest article, Deborah Mayhew, a usability engineering consultant since 1986, gives ideas for preparing a cost-justification analysis and follows that up with four stories illustrating the impact of usability testing on the bottom line. Read it here!

Want more ideas for selling usability?

• David Travis has two great articles on the subject.
• Download our "Selling Usability" PowerPoint presentation.

We're looking for more guest authors! Have an idea for an article? Email us.

Not sure what the differences between UserVue and Morae Recorder are? Confused about which one to use in a particular situation?

Instructional designer Conan Heiselt breaks it all down—complete with real-life examples from TechSmith's internal testing—in this 4-minute video.

Conan's video is part of a series of tutorials covering all TechSmith products during the month of January. The training department has planned a couple more tutorials on UX products, so be sure to bookmark the Visual Lounge blog or add the RSS feed to your reader.

Morae saves screen and video recordings in the proprietary .rdg file format by default. You can always use Morae to open an .rdg file and view the recorded footage later.

But what if you want to share the recording as video with someone who doesn't have Morae installed?

This quick, written tutorial shows you how to set Morae to record both an .rdg and a .wmv (Windows Media Video) file at the same time. It also shows how to convert an .rdg file you already have to .wmv or .avi (the latter format can be imported into just about any video editor).