In our first iteration of literature research, we mainly focused on the following topics:

• Usability Testing, especially remote usability testing (synchronous / asynchronous approeach)
• Usability Testing Tools and their functions
• Structure of Usability Tests

In our last blog entry we showed what functions are integrated in the current version of the remote testing tool. Still there was one last issue we had to specify before we could seal the state as „final“ and bring the tool into the testing phase. This last issue was: „Is it possible to track the mouse movement and click behaviour of the test subject?“. We did some research regarding this topic and got to this solution. OBS as Software is only able to track the cursor movement but it can not highlight clicks or the cursor itself. If we want to this we would either need a third party software or code this function ourself. We discussed this with our project supervisor and agreed on using the tracking ability OBS is offering and leave the highlighting out. One reason is the amount of time we would need to implement this function ,as it may be to much for this project. Another one is, that the main focus should be on the research aspect not the coding aspect. Future development on this remote usability tool should take care of the cursor highlighting.

Milestones:

• Literature Research → 2018/12/15
• Study Design → 2018/12/21
• First Study Implementation (Experts) → 2018/12/10 (start)

  • Get participants involved
  • Carry out interviews
• Second Study Implementation (Peers) → 2019/01/06 (start) .

  • Get participants
  • Carry out interviews
• Finish Studies i.e. gathering data: → 2019/01/25 (end)
• Evaluation of results → 2019/02/08 (end)
• Finalizing Paper → 2019/02/12 (end)

Lab Usability Tests have the big problem, that the tester and the participant have to be in the same place at the same time, this leads to a huge planning overhead, which is hard to come by. Remote Usability Testing has the advantage, that both sides don’t need to be in the same place, in some setups it even isn’t relevant if both persons are there simultaneously. This saves time and money. The two types of remote Usability Tests are asynchronous and synchronous tests. It is called remote Asynchronous Tests if the participant doesn’t need a supervisor. Brunn, Gull, Hofmeister and Stage (2009) differ between autologging and self-reporting. This means data can be acquired either by logging actions, like clicking a button or a link or time spent on a page automatically or the participant is asked to write down his experience and actions. The Synchronous Test requires the participant and the tester to find a timeslot, often times the tester is able to see the screen of the participant. Some drawbacks of the synchronous testing are required time for every participant and the requirements for the participant, especially soft- and hardware.

The market analysis has shown that often tools designed for conferences and videocalls, like Skype, Google Hangout and Zoom. But there are a lot more tools, which often have different features, considering some are for synchronous and some for asynchronous remote testings. YouEye (asynchronous) for example provides task completion statistics and survey responses. ClickHeat delivers a visual heatmap of clicks, showing hot and cold areas. A big issue often cited is the need for the participant to install the tool and the need of additional hardware, like a web-cam or a microphone, this lower the accesability of remote-testing-tools.

The homepage http://remoteresear.ch/tools/ provides a long list of tools and their specific details.

Two tools were found, which are very similar to the OBS-Tool, this are Morae and Lookback. Lookback Lookback captures the screen, the audio and the user reactions. The recorded data can be stored in a cloud. It can be used for different plattforms, like smartphones, websites and even prototypes. Morae Morae can record the audio, the face and the screen of the participant. Itprovides more possibilites to manage different test-series than the OBS-Tool. It allows audio annotations and marker. The videos can also be stored on the server.