Morae Usability Testing

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An Overview of Morae^TM

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Background
Improving the usability and user experience of software, Web sites, intranets and eBusiness applications has proven to increase customer satisfaction and retention while decreasing development and support costs. Many organizations have realized a 10-to-100-fold return on their investment by incorporating usability methods into the development cycle. Despite the positive returns generated from practicing usability and usercentered design, many organizations have not implemented it because of the costs involved, including a significant investment in infrastructure, time and training. Today, Morae eliminates many of these barriers by providing a single software solution that enables organizations to incorporate usability testing and analysis into development processes with low risk.

Introduction to Morae
Morae is an innovative software-based solution for usability testing that enhances data collection and speeds up analysis. Its dramatic effectiveness lies in the fact that it actually reduces the amount of work needed, not only at setup, but also during the data logging, analysis and presentation stages. Its design works well for users new to the field of usability testing, as well as for seasoned sspecialists.

Based on TechSmith’s Rich Recording Technology, Morae is a complete solution that not only records the computer screen and camera video, but also automatically creates a synchronized index of events occurring behind the scenes in applications and in the operating system. Now you can search screen and video recordings for specific events that occurred — like when a user viewed a Web page, clicked a link, pressed a certain key, opened a dialog box or viewed specific text. And, you can easily perform in-depth analysis, mark important segments, and quickly create video presentations to share.

Functionality that you could previously only obtain by combining multiple hardware and software products is now fully integrated into one software solution — Morae. With Rich Recording Technology built-in, Morae can record and index the video recordings in a way never before possible.

How Morae Works
Morae is composed of three components: Morae Recorder, Morae Remote Viewer, and Morae Manager. These components work together to provide an easy-to-use, total recording system based on TechSmith’s Rich Recording Technology.

Morae Recorder
Utilizing Rich Recording Technology, Morae Recorder creates a complete chronicle of the events that occur behind the scenes in applications and the operating system, as well as the onscreen and keyboard activity of the user. These data streams are recorded in sync with video of the user (through a web camera or other camera device), and audio of the user (through a microphone). Because Recorder runs silently in the background, it never disturbs the user. And it captures only the input streams that you specify during configuration, saving the recording in a file format that can be opened by Morae Manager.

The figure on the next page illustrates the input streams captured by Recorder:

Morae Remote Viewer
Morae Remote Viewer provides support for one or multiple computers to connect over a network to a computer that is running Morae Recorder. This flexibility allows your entire usability team to observe the screen and camera video, and hear the audio of the user, streaming from the Recorder source computer. Additionally, anyone logged into a Remote Viewer computer can add Markers during recording, complete with text notes. Remote Viewer automatically saves and indexes the Markers with the accompanying video and audio streams. The camera video, screen video, and audio streams can be saved locally in a WMV file for immediate playback. Utilizing multiple Remote Viewers, usability teams can conduct collaborative user experience testing.

Morae Manager
Rich Recording Technology automatically indexes the screen and video recordings collected by Recorder, allowing you to easily search through recordings in Morae Manager. Using Manager’s advanced Search Editor, you can search for the occurrence of specific activities — such as Web page changes, keystrokes, mouse clicks, or window events. You can also search recordings for specific text that appeared onscreen during recording. Here is a search result example from Manager:

Manager allows you to access additional information about these events, making it easy to calculate performance measures such as time on task and delay time. For each event, the results list provides detailed information such as when the event occurred, what type of event it was, the title of the window in which the event happened, a description of the event (i.e., for Web page changes, the description gives the actual URL), and the application in which it occurred. Additionally, when you select any event in the list, the video recordings of the screen and camera instantly move to the point in time when the event happened and highlight where on the screen it occurred. You can quickly calculate time metrics with the dynamic built-in calculator in the Metrics area. Additionally, you can isolate important segments, add text notes, annotate with audio and quickly create video highlights to share. You even have the option to display the screen video with the video of the user as a picture-in-picture image.

How the Morae Components Work Together
Morae Recorder uses a configuration created in Morae Manager or within Recorder to create recording content including screen video, user audio and video, and a chronicle of system events all automatically synchronized. It also streams the screen video, camera video and audio to multiple Morae Remote Viewers.

Anyone logged into a Remote Viewer station can observe the recording session and set meaningful markers with accompanying text notes. This marker information can be searched for and viewed later using Morae Manager.

Within Morae Manager, you can start new projects and manage them, configure Recorder settings, open and analyze recordings, and, if desired, create a presentation video.

The following figure (Fig. 3, on the next page) illustrates how Morae Recorder, Manager, and Remote Viewer work together:

Conclusion
Morae, with Rich Recording Technology built in, provides a faster, more powerful way to conduct computer-based research. By capturing and creating searchable video of not only what happens on the screen and with the user, but also what is happening in applications and the operating system, Morae provides invaluable feedback for discovering ways to improve the usability and user experience of software, Web sites, intranets and eBusiness applications.

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