Some Slightly Irregular

If you’ve ever done usability tests using mobile devices you know that it can get very complicated very quickly: sleds, goosenecks, document cameras, converters, physical restraints (well, maybe not physical restraints, but “Don’t move the device beyond this point” markers), and a lot more.

Since I wrote a book about testing (Rocket Surgery Made Easy), people often ask me about the best way to do mobile testing. I think I’ve finally figured out what’s what, and I’m going to write a few blog posts about it. To begin with, though, I thought I’d mention two tools that seem to be well-kept secrets (i.e., I’m always surprised how many people haven’t heard about them.)

They’re useful for solving two problems:

• How you record mobile tests, and
• How you display them to observers.

(They’re both for iOS devices, not Android or Windows Phone.)

First, recording.

As near as I can tell, Steve Jobs must have been scared by multitasking when he was a kid, with the result that it’s nearly impossible to do more than one thing at a time on your iPhone or iPad–or iWatch, presumably. (Exception: You can listen to music and do one other thing. Steve was apparently fond of music.)

The upshot is that there’s never been much prospect for running a screen recorder in the background under iOS. And screen recorders (e.g., Camtasia, et al), are like mothers’ milk to us usability folks. I had despaired of ever finding one, until recently.

First, I came across UX Recorder (www.uxrecorder.com). And then someone (OK, it was Dave Greenlees. Thanks, Dave.) alerted me to Magitest (www.magitest.com).

They have a lot of similarities. They both record what’s on the screen, the user’s face (via the front-facing camera), and think-aloud audio (via the microphone). They both save the recordings to the camera roll when you’re done. And they both superimpose some representation of the user’s gestures (taps, swipes, pinches, etc.) on the recording.

Both have free versions that let you do short test recordings. The full Magitest costs $24.99, and UX Recorder has a pay-per-recording plan, or $59.99 for unlimited use.

The truth is, given the limitations imposed by Apple, they’re both pretty remarkable. But they’re not perfect.

They both seem to slow things down. (Typing can be painful, for instance.) And the recordings can take a very long time to encode and save. (All of this is from limited use/experimentation, so anyone with *actual* knowledge, please chime in with corrections.)

They both can only record things that happen in a web browser, so you can’t use them to test apps. But Magitest has an SDK module that you can add to your native-app project code which will let you make app-specific recordings.

BTW, there *was* another app called Display Recorder in the App Store briefly that *didn’t* play by the no-multitasking rules, and I was lucky enough to grab a copy before Apple banned it. It allowed you to record *anything*, including other apps, seemed not to slow things down, and saved its files remarkably fast. The bad news is that it doesn’t exist anymore, at least not without jailbreaking. It seems to live on in the Cydia store, though, if you’re the kind of person who’s OK with ripping the “Do not remove under penalty of law” labels off pillows and mattresses.

Second, displaying.

The truth is, while recordings are nice to have, I’m much more concerned about getting a bunch of people in a room and having them observe the tests live, so displaying what’s happening on a big screen is crucial.

There are two basic approaches: screen sharing (mirroring what’s on the screen) and camera views (what the user sees, including his or her own hands).

I’ll go into the pros and cons of both in another post, but I can tell you one thing: If all you want to do is mirror the screen to people in another room, you should at least consider Airplay–a feature built into iOS, the Mac OS, and Apple TVs for streaming audio and video.

It’s this simple:

1. Connect your iDevice (iPhone 4S or higher, iPad 2 or higher, iPad Mini) and a Mac or PC to the same WiFi network.
2. Install Reflector ($12.99 from www.reflectorapp.com ) on the Mac or PC.
3. Turn on Airplay on the iDevice.

Bingo: Reflector mirrors your iDevice screen on the Mac or PC. (I have to say the effect is oddly striking. It always feels a little bit like magic to me.)

From there, you can run a screen recorder (e.g., Camtasia) to make a recording, and run screen sharing software (e.g. GoToMeeting) to send the image to the observation room. (Reflector doesn’t transmit audio from the iDevice microphone, so you’ll have to hook up a mic to the Mac or PC.)

I’ve used this to project the demo tests that I do whenever I give talks, and it works remarkably well.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m going to write another post or two about what I’ve finally concluded about mobile testing. (I have to say even I was surprised by my conclusions.)

People have been asking me for years when I’m going to be speaking near [insert name of country in Europe here].

I’m basically a stay-at-home kind of guy, so my answer has always been some variant of  ”One of these days. Hopefully. Maybe.”

Next week, it’s actually going to happen.

On Thursday (20 Sept.) thanks to the good folks running the From The Front 2012 conference, I’ll be teaching my day-long “learn how to do your own usability testing” workshop in Bologna, Italy. Details and registration are at http://fromthefront.it and the first five people using the discount code “rocketsurgery” can save 20% on workshop registration.

I’m also giving the opening keynote at the conference on Friday (21 Sept.), and the code “skrug” will give the first five users 20% off on conference registration. It’s a full day of really good speakers in a fabulous XVII Century theater.

Both events will be conducted in English, with opt-in simultaneous translation available for the conference.

(BTW, I’m as puzzled by the pirate motif of the conference site as you are. Don’t worry about it. The producers are really nice, smart people. I just figure it’s a cultural thing.)

I don’t know about you, but even though I enjoy watching some videos online, I almost always find them to be   t o o    s   l   o   w.

I don’t mind if a film noir from the 40′s drags when I’m watching it on TV; that’s part of the fun. But most webinars (frankly), and even things like TED talks (although I know it’s heresy to say it aloud) can seem to go on forever.

And as soon as my attention starts to wander, I start kidding myself that I can actually multitask, which amounts to a) opening up my inbox and working through some of the email languishing there while I half-listen, and b) gradually losing the thread of what the speaker is saying, which makes it seem even more boring. Eventually, I just close the video.

One problem is the inherent difference between print and video: You can skim print. In fact, we do it all the time. We’re constantly adjusting our pace, all the way from “just glancing at the headings” to “rereading the same sentence until we finally understand it”, with dozens of gradations in between. This flexibility lets us skip over (or at least breeze through) the parts that just aren’t of much interest or value to us.

Granted, the system isn’t perfect. We’re not always the best judges of what we need to pay attention to. And it can often lead to skipping over the harder stuff (the parts we don’t understand), which may be exactly what we do need to read carefully. But for the most part, it’s very effective and efficient. (Personally, I instantly skim past any description of a landscape in a novel. I can’t picture them well in my head, so they add nothing to the experience. If I couldn’t skip them, there are many books I’m sure I wouldn’t have read.)

Which brings me to my tool tip.

Many years ago (perhaps 20), I sometimes found myself watching videos of usability tests that someone else had conducted. As much as I love usability testing, watching a batch of prerecorded tests can be, quite honestly, like watching paint dry. The first few can be fascinating, but after that….

So I went looking and found myself a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder, for those of you under 25) that had variable speed playback WITH AUDIO. Almost every VCR could vary the playback speed somewhat, but 99 percent of them muted the audiowhen you did it. This one played the audio and  adjusted the pitch proportionally so you didn’t get the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” effect.

A few years ago, while again watching some usability test recordings online, I started hankering for the same functionality. In fact, I suggested to the folks at UserTesting.com that they add it as a feature. (I had suggested it to some other vendors in the past, but they just nodded their heads and pretended to be making a note about it.) I figured by now somebody must have solved the problem, so I went looking around online, and sure enough, I found just what I wanted.

It’s a tool called MySpeed from enounce.com.

For $29.99 (Windows or Mac), you can use it to speed up or slow down online Flash and HTML5 (FLV and MV4) video. (There’s also a premium version that works with offline files, but it costs more.)

My experience: There’s hardly any informational video that can’t be improved by watching it at 1.4x normal speed. And many can be watched happily at 2x, depending on the content and the speaker’s style. And if you miss anything, you can easily rewind a little and switch (with hotkeys) to normal speed. It can be very satisfying to watch a video in half the time.

There are some caveats, of course: Some sites, like Ted.com, stream video just fast enough to be played at normal speed, so if you play it faster it will keep pausing to refill the buffer. But Enounce has a free trial version. Check it out. Or let me know if you know of a better one.

BTW, UserTesting.com did recently implement it as a feature for the benefit of people watching test videos, and they did a very nice job of it.

UPDATE - June 11th: The results of our survey about why serious usability problems often go unfixed–and our own theories–are now online in our slides from last week’s UPA (or is it UXPA?) at SlideShare. Thanks again to everyone who responded to the survey!

Caroline Jarrett and I are doing a session at the UPA conference in June (in beautiful, oppressively hot downtown Las Vegas) about why people pay for our advice about usability and then ignore it, and we could use your help.

Can you do us a favor and fill out a short survey?

(Caroline won’t let me say just how short it is, because everyone’s mileage will vary so I’d inevitably be misleading some of you. But I can tell you it’s only eight questions, and five of them are multiple choice. And it’s all on one Web page. And we won’t ask you to identify yourself at all.)

Thanks!

UPDATE: Some folks have been asking what our session is about. I hesitated to explain it to avoid influencing people’s responses, but Caroline (who’s writing a book for UX people on how to do surveys) pointed out that since the survey is exploratory, not statistical, it’s OK.

So here’s the description of our UPA talk, which will be on Thurday, June 7 at 9 am:

———————————————————–

“…but the light bulb has to want to change”:
Why do the most serious usability problems we uncover often go unfixed?

As a profession, one of our most important motivations is that we want products to get better. But even when our recommendations are welcomed and apparently highly valued, they often aren’t acted upon–especially, it seems, when the problems involved are serious. This session offers some reasons why this happens, and suggests what we can do to improve our track record.

———————————————————–

The title, of course, is a reference to the old joke:

“How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

One. But the light bulb has to want to change.”

OK. We know your boss. We all know your boss.

He’s a very nice guy, really. But he just hasn’t got any, you know, *money* lying around these days. So he can’t send you to conferences and seminars and workshops anymore. He feels bad about it. (Not quite as bad as you do, but he really does feel bad about it.)

Maybe a few years ago he could send you to things, and maybe next year he’ll be able to again, but not right now. (As Clint Eastwood explained to us during the Super Bowl, it’s halftime in America.)

Here’s your chance to make him feel better about himself, by enabling him to treat you right:

Register for my do-it-yourself usability testing workshop in Mountain View, CA, (March 7th) by Midnight (PST) this Friday, February 10th on Monday, February 13th.

[NOTE: We had a glitch that resulted in early registration going offline at midday Friday. And yes, it was confusion about whether midnight is 12 am vs. 12 pm. So we thought it was only fair to extend it a day.]

Three things will happen:

• You’ll save $100 by getting the early registration rate of $495. (Even $595 is a bargain when you realize that next year we’ll probably be going back to our pre-recession pricing of $795/$895. But your boss can’t think of anything as a bargain these days.)

• You’ll come back to work on March 8th all ready to start running your own usability tests. Your (and his) products will be better, your (and his) users will be happier, customer support calls will go down, your boss’s bosses will be happier, and home, as Dickens said, will be more like heaven.

And finally,

• Our sponsor, UserTesting.com, will perform a free mini-usability study of your website.

After you register, we’ll ask for the URL you want tested, and the folks at UserTesting.com will get to work:

• • Watching users search Google for what you offer
  • Watching users perform common tasks—such as placing an order—on your website
  • Watching users naturally search the Internet to research your company’s credibility

What they’ll provide you:

• • They’ll set up and run a 3-user test of your site.
  • They’ll give you the complete videos of the three sessions.
  • They’ll annotate the videos, make clips of the highlights, and write a summary of the key findings.
  • And it’s free! (The three user sessions alone ordinarily cost $39 each.)

To take advantage, simply register for my Mountain View workshop by February 10th. Or register for one of the great UX workshops taught by Lou Rosenfeld (Adaptable Information Architecture: How to Say No to Your Next Redesign) and Luke Wroblewski (Web Form Design).

Or take them all for just $995—all three for the price of two!

So, an incredible deal just got better—three best-selling UX authors all teaching highly practical workshops geared toward UX practitioners in an intimate setting (capped at 50). Low prices per workshop. And now this great offer from UserTesting.com.

What are you waiting for?

Help!

We (Lou Rosenfeld and I) want to bring our workshops to New York in the Spring, and we’re looking for a nice place to hold them.

Have you attended a talk/seminar/conference somewhere in the Big Apple recently? 

We’re looking for a room that seats about 45 people, with some tables for PCs. It has to be something we could rent for two or three consecutive days, from 8 to 5.

And, of course, a decent screen and PC projector. And wi-fi. Lots of wi-fi.

We’re not looking for a hotel conference room. We actually *like* funky spaces (we’ve done science museums, a silent movie theater, and even a zoo in the past), as long as they’re clean and comfortable.

If you know of anything, please either add a comment here or send me email: skrug@sensible.com.

Thanks!

If, like me, you sometimes wish there was something you could do to help our government (besides vote and pay your taxes), here’s a chance to put your accumulated User Experience skills to good use.

As part of a .gov reform initiative launched this summer by the White House, the GSA is running a two-week online conversation with web experts and the public to generate ideas for re-inventing how the federal government delivers information and services online.

From now until Friday, Sept. 30, head on over to the National Dialogue on Improving Government Websites and add your two cents to the discussion. Bright ideas particularly welcome. No whiners, please.

Also, a number of UX folks have been asked to help move the discussion along, and I’m very pleased to be one of them. In addition to putting in our two cents worth whenever we have a chance, each of us “experts” has an assigned hour to be commenting live. So if you can, swing by on Thursday at 3 pm ET, when Jakob Nielsen and I will be hanging out in the Usability and Design topic.

[Update: The "live" hour is over, but Jakob and I are still reading and commenting every day. (I even added two ideas of my own.) So please drop by and add an idea or comment and vote on everyone else's.]

One of my all-time favorite advertisements was for baseball gloves.

I remember seeing it in the back of comic books, alongside ads for things like sea monkeys, X-ray glasses, ant farms, and Charles Atlas. (Yes, I’m really that old.)

It asked you six questions about yourself, and if you answered four or more of them ”YES” then you needed to get a Wilson pro model major league glove.

I started searching for the ad on the Internet in 1999 when I wanted to use it to make a point in Don’t Make Me Think, but I couldn’t find a copy until just a few months ago.

The problem turned out to be defective memory. It actually wasn’t in comic books at all, but in Boys’ Life, the Boy Scout magazine. (I was never a scout, but my brother was, and I loved reading Boys’ Life.)

The ad has stuck in my mind all these years because of the last question: Would a big league glove give you confidence? Somehow, this always struck me as advertising at its very best. I don’t think a month ever goes by without me thinking of that phrase in one context or another. (Seriously.)

But now that I look at it as an adult who’s been subjected to a lifetime of advertising, I can see that the whole thing was brilliant.

If you read it, you’ll see that they hook you right away by feeding you two softball (no pun intended) questions that you can answer without a moment’s thought: Do you play ball at least three times a week? and Are you a member of an organized team? It reminds me of one of BJ Fogg’s brilliant points about what it really takes to change a behavior: start with small, dead-easy steps (to paraphrase badly).

Then they appeal to the dreamer in you (what I suppose we’d call aspirational now): Would you like a major league career? Again, who has to think about it? Who wouldn’t like a career in major league baseball–even then, when it paid a tiny fraction of what it does now?

Then the questioners establish their own credibility by acknowledging that this isn’t just going to happen magically: Are you willing to devote long hours of practice to baseball? These are clearly smart, knowledgeable, worldly-wise people. And in return for a career in the majors, even long hours sound like a small price to pay. After all, how long can ”long hours” be? I already practice a lot.

Then they turn to practical considerations: Is your old glove worn out or too small? “How do they know these things about me,” you wonder? Of course you need a new glove. How could you possibly hope to get to the majors with that hand-me-down you’re using now? What a ridiculous idea. Buying a new glove clearly isn’t just some frivolous expenditure; it’s an investment in your now-almost-certain future in professional baseball.

And finally, the killer: Would a big league glove give you confidence? In your heart of hearts, it’s suddenly crystal-clear to you: like the Tin Man, all you really need, all that’s actually been standing between you and the seventh game of a World Series, is some confidence.

This is followed by the incredibly understated, casual, there’s-nothing-to-it call to action. Not “Tell your father that you really, really need a new glove,” but Ask your Dad to help you select a Wilson pro model glove [when he takes you on your next heartwarming father-son trip to] your sporting goods store. Of course Dad will help you pick one out. What father wouldn’t?

Notice, not a word anywhere about competitive brands, price, features, or even why a Wilson pro glove is so good.

Sheer genius, in my book.

So, in the same spirit (only without the genius part), here’s my “Should you attend one of Steve Krug’s usability testing workshops?” quiz:

CHECK YOUR STANDING HERE
	Yes	No
Do you currently run usability tests three or more times a year?
Would you (and your boss) be happy if you could learn how to do testing faster and cheaper and still get the results you need?
Do your tests often uncover serious problems that don’t get fixed anyway?
Are you willing to devote one day to learning how to do testing, or improving your existing skills?
If you don’t do any testing, would you like to?
Are you hoping to someday have the words “user experience” or “usability” in your job title?
Would you win more usability-related arguments around the office if you could say things like, “Well, that’s the way Steve Krug told me we should do it”?
Can you manage to get to Washington DC on Sept. 7, Seattle on Sept. 27, or London on Oct. 6?
Would spending a day with Steve Krug learning how to do testing give you confidence?
If you checked “YES” to three or more questions, then you’re ready for a Steve Krug workshop. Print out the workshop page and leave it on your boss’s desk with a cheerful  note that says something like “I could do this in Seattle on the 27th. Only $495.”

P.S. Early registration for Seattle and London ends tomorrow (Sept. 9th).

Lou Rosenfeld (well, his publishing arm, Rosenfeld Media) is having a Twitter contest to promote our Fall workshops (DC, Seattle, and London).

Pretty simple:

• You tweet (or retweet) a few words about our workshops.
• Include the hashtag #UXworkshops and the URL  http://bit.ly/oMJM57.
• You’ll automagically get a chance to win one of my books, signed (inscribed, even, if you tell me what to write; nothing too obscene, though, please).

He’ll be giving away one book each Friday in September (starting next Friday).

There’s a sample Tweet and a much better explanation (including the fact that you could choose a signed copy of Lou’s book, or Indi Young’s, instead) on Lou’s site at http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/announcements/2011/09/the_tweet_that_could_win_you_a.php

Good luck, and thanks for the help.

There’s one phenomenon you really should be prepared for when you introduce the idea of usability tests in your organization…

Seriously. This really happens. All the time.

The problem is that a lot more people are familiar with focus groups than with usability tests. So sometimes no matter how often you correct them (politely and patiently, of course), they’ll still refer to your upcoming usability tests as…focus groups.

The good news is that as soon as you get them to actually come and observe a test, the difference becomes clear and the problem goes away. But until then, it can be disconcerting. And sometimes amusing.

Make sure you have your 30-second elevator pitch explanation of the difference down pat, something like

Usability tests are about watching people actually try to use what we’re building, so we can detect and fix the parts that confuse or frustrate them.

Focus groups are about having people talk about things, like their opinions about our products, their past experiences with them, or their reactions to new ideas that we show them.

So the main difference is that in usability tests, you watch people actually use things, instead of just talk about them.”