Explore Morae

If you've been waiting for the perfect time to try Morae, and didn't sign up for the Morae 30-Day Challenge last month, don't wait any longer! We've extended the Morae 30-Day Challenge for another 30 days. You won't have to spend a dime - it's free and it takes only minutes every few days to participate By participating, you'll get a personal tour of Morae and plus receive brief, step-by-step emails from our own UX team experts. You'll end the challenge with a finished usability project and knowledge of how to use Morae.

What is Morae? Software that lets you study real people as they use your Web site or software product, spot the problems they encounter, and build a convincing case for how to improve the experience.

Best of all, you can discuss your experience with other challenge-takers and ask questions as you continue working.

Need even more convincing? Here's an example pulled from Day 1 of the last challenge:

"...open Morae Manager, and open the Example Project. Today, we'll look at the Analyze tab. Let's check out user errors for severity and where they happened in the UI.

1. Use search to get a list of error markers; include tasks to help you understand in which tasks the errors occurred. Choose Markers and Tasks from the search dialog and search now. http://screencast.com/t/x5QT6McCq"

To get started, just download the special, free, 30-day trial version of Morae and we'll guide you through the rest. Ready...set...go!

Morae isn't the only TechSmith product that is good for usability and design. It only makes sense that products that let you capture your screen and share it with anyone would be useful to collect design patterns and clips to share with others.

Jing

As mentioned on YABOU (Yet Another Blog On Usability), there is a shared bookmark site on Magnolia where contributors use Jing to make and upload webclips of interesting UI designs. Rather than a long page of multiple screenshots and text, each submission has a simple paragraph and then a short clip that showcases the design. Jing makes this process quick and fluid, allowing users to record they like and share it immediately.

SnagIt

SnagIt is used for collecting design patterns or interface designs. Blogger Richard Wand shows how he uses SnagIt's scrolling capture and Flickr output to collect screenshots of various e-commerce Web sites. He also links to a few such galleries, including his own collection of 68 examples of online product display.

Flickr isn't the only output option for SnagIt. You can download any of the available Outputs for SnagIt, including AOL Instant Messenger, Moveable Type, TypePad, WordPress.com, MindManager and more! Put your designs or others you like directly into your blog, email them to a friend to discuss - there's no limit to the way you can share your screen content.