by Don Burnett
Usability test and user experience research can very time consuming in any design and development environment. Morae by TechSmith.com is software for usability testing and user experience research that helps you identify site and application design problems and share them with stakeholders.
Usability is such a big category these days, and even the government has gotten into the act with standards for this. If you are a developer either for platform applications or web applications you cannot afford to ignore this.
There are not many products that make this process easier to work through, when I say "usability" people confuse this "accessibility" which really isn't quite the same thing.. You need to find something that will be helpful at measuring these metrics. MORAE brings software that helps to automate this process in a good way.
What tools does Morae bring to the party?
You can instantly calculate and graph standard usability measurements, so you can focus on understanding results. This is important especially if you have a large project and the metrics come from a monumental set of data.
The graphing and visualization features are really very powerful. They allow your gathered data to be almost immediately understandable and meaningful. You can then take these to your team and help them to focus on areas of need of improvement.
But it's not all just graphing, the product comes with a video recorder option that lets you create custom studies, test cases, and record onscreen activity during test sessions. You can observe the interactivity also on other machines over a LAN, so you can keep the test environments separate, to keep the results as "scientific" as possible. The recorder option also allows notes and markers to be made during recordings, to mark events and user interactions and how the interface can respond.
This is a very well received application, with users such as the United States Air Force Academy and Stanford University. If you want to read more, they have a great white paper that you can read. I really recommend if you are interested in Usability that you check this program out, whether you develop for the web, platform applications this is a great place to start making your life easier and more productive for you team immediately.
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