4.3 Recording

Recording usability tests or interviews to have user quotes for presentations is standard practice in usability agencies. The participants need to sign release forms to agree to the videos being used. In independent free software projects recording participants is rather useless because it creates much work just for presentation. Since we concentrate on small test sets with quick iterations this creates too much overhead. There should be no personal data or images and just recording of issues. Also, reviewing the recordings afterwards uses up twice the time. It can be useful for longer tests though so here are some tools: Pongo is a picture-in-picture recording tool for free operating systems. Originally started by Andreas Nilsson, I used and improved upon it during the Shotwell tests. Unfortunately it is only a command-line tool at the moment. DeskScribe is a click-tracking application which creates a click map similar to but not as good as ClickHeat mentioned in 6.13 Monitor users. When you test a desktop application it might still be useful.