Usability Testing with Morae

Get great insights with Morae

Set up, record, observe, and analyze usability studies, focus groups, field research, and product testing. Watch the study or interaction remotely, take notes, and analyze results to instantly share your insights with others.

Customize Morae to work for you

Write your own Recorder, Observer, and Manager plug-ins with Morae’s pluggable architecture, enabling you and your development team to build features specific to your testing environment.

Learn more about Morae Plug-ins ›

Morae Plug-in Examples and Resources

Draw the Path of the Mouse

Use Morae's open architecture to build custom capabilities like the mouse path plug-in, which is included in Morae 3. The plug-in will draw a line following the mouse cursor giving you information about the user's mouse path and movement. You can use this information to evaluate distance between buttons or screen elements, or to see where the user tends to navigate.

Software Development Reference Materials

Here's the documentation on the nuts and bolts of Morae that allow you and your development team to develop cool new tools that use Morae's rich functionality.

All plug-ins are COM objects that implement interfaces designed to interact with Recorder and Manager.

• Intro to Plug-ins (PDF) 
• Morae Enumeration Interfaces (PDF) 

Recorder

• Capturing Event Data (PDF) 
• Supplying Data From a Recorder Plug-in to Observers (PDF) 
• Using Recorder as a COM Server (PDF) 

Manager

• Morae Manager Extensions (PDF)
• Data Analysis for Graphing in Manager (PDF) 
• Information Supplied by Manager (PDF)
• Morae RRT Event Interfaces (PDF)
• Reading and Displaying Events in Manager (PDF)

Sample Projects and Example Code

Examples for Microsoft Outlook (ZIP)

• Outlook AddIn1 builds an example plug-in for Recorder that loads into Microsoft Outlook and can be expanded to capture e-mail events during a recording session.
• Outlook Reader builds an example plug-in that can be expanded for Manager to read the events recorded by the OutlookAddIn1 plug-in.

Example code for a plug-in that Morae Manager loads to customize the video during playback and production.

• Customize video during playback and production (ZIP)

A set of installers for Visual Studio wizards to facilitate getting started on plug-in development.

• Morae Draw Plug-in Wiz (EXE)
• Morae Manager Event Handler (EXE)
• Morae Recorder VS Plug-in (EXE)

A set of IDL files to assist plug-in developers in a Visual Studio project.

• Visual Studio IDL files for plug-in development (ZIP)

COM Server

Morae Recorder supports an out-of-process COM server, which gives a programmer access to many of its powerful recording features. This functionality can be accessed through any programming environment that supports COM, including Visual Basic, Visual C/C++, Visual Studio.NET, Delphi, and C++ Builder.

Example Uses of Morae COM Server

Monitor Web Site Usage

Use the COM server to track how users navigate websites. Use a Browser Helper Object (BHO) from Internet Explorer to monitor page transitions. The BHO can act as a client to Recorder's COM server. It can then start and stop a recording based on whatever criteria you want (i.e., navigate to a certain page). The BHO can also insert Markers into the recording with vital information such as mouse coordinates and URLs.

Automate Usability Tests

Your custom application can be a COM client. During development, you can have Recorder start a recording when the user launches your application and stop a recording when the application is closed. You can then automatically insert Markers when the user interacts with specific parts of your application such as when certain user interface elements are clicked on.

Control Morae Recorder Programmatically

Because Recorder is controlled programmatically, you have ultimate control over when a recording is started or stopped and what is captured. Practically anything that can be programmed can be a COM client and can access Recorder's powerful features.