Usability Testing – Learning the World

ITS Card Sort: The Test Run

May 20, 2009May 14, 2009 by Ken Newquist

Card sorts are an information architecture tool used to help discover how people would organize information on your web site if they ran the zoo. The idea is that you give people a bunch of cards labeled with web page names and then ask them to sort them into piles. They then label the piles, … Read more

Camtasia Studio: Screen Capture Test (Windows)

March 11, 2009February 20, 2009 by Ken Newquist

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Camtasia Studio, in which I use Google to find Waldo. It was recorded on a Windows XP machine with a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final Quicktime video is 640c494pixels (full-size; I recorded a portion of the screen) It is 1.16 minutes long, and 2.95 MB in size. … Read more

Captivate: Screen Capture Test (Windows)

February 20, 2009 by Ken Newquist

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Adobe Captivate, in which I use Google to find Waldo. It was recorded on a Windows XP machine with a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final video is actually a series of Flash audio and video files. I can’t easily insert it into this post, so I’m attaching … Read more

Screenflow: Screen Capture Test (Mac)

February 20, 2009February 20, 2009 by Ken Newquist

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using ScreenFlow, in which I use Google to find Waldo. It was recorded on a Mac OS X 10.5 machine with a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final Quicktime video is 960×600 pixels (about 50% of the original screen size) It is 1.04 minutes long, and 7.7 MB in … Read more

Silverback: Screen Capture Test (Mac)

March 9, 2009February 20, 2009 by Ken Newquist

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Silverback, in which I use Google to find Waldo. It was recorded on a Mac OS X 10.5 machine with a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final Quicktime video is 468×300 pixels (about 25% of the original screen size) It is 1.01 minutes long, and 19.22 MB in … Read more

Camstudio: Screen Capture Test (Windows)

July 24, 2009February 19, 2009 by Ken Newquist

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Camstudio, in which I use Google to find Waldo. This was done on a Windows XP machine running Camstudio 2.0. The audio was recorded using a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final video uses the Intel Indeo Video 4.5 codec. The AVI video full-screen, 1.05 minutes long and … Read more

Video Screen Capture on Windows

February 19, 2009 by Ken Newquist

We’re gearing up for a major round of usability testing this semester. I’ve found two good video screen capture apps for the Mac in the form of Silverback and Screenflow but finding equivelent programs on the Windows side is proving to be more of a challenge. Jing is very close to what I want — … Read more

Gorilla, err, Guerrilla Usability Testing

July 24, 2009February 11, 2009 by Ken Newquist

One our first tasks in getting usability testing for Moodle up and running is to find software that can capture video of everything that’s happening on screen, while simultaneously recording the audio of the user’s thought process. We’re still looking at Windows options, but the hands-down favorite on the Mac is Silverback. This $50 app … Read more

Moodle Usability Testing

February 10, 2009 by Ken Newquist

One of our semester-long projects is to do usability testing of Moodle. We’ll be conducting a number of tests in which we give people a series of tasks to complete and how they do them. We’re not alone in this; we’re working with a number of other colleges (including Smith College, Reed College, Macalester College, Kenyon College, Earlham College and Luther College) who will be conducting tests of their own this spring.