Mr. Daniel Romano’s Weblog

So as a follow up to Usability Testing with Morae. We a very simple small test of around 5 tasks with 2 respondents (interns actually). Keep in mind this is the first time I have ever moderated a usability session (I’m usually in the other room), so I didn’t really get a sense of how the Observer worked, but my research partner was very happy with it.

Creating the study, outlining the tasks, and putting together a follow-up survey was very very easy. The only problem was I kept going of script — perhaps evidence of my lack of moderators experience — but my observers was able to keep up.

Importing the data was a breeze. We are running the Observer and the Manager on the same box. Two clicks and we had all the data from the sessions, graphs, charts, even power point presentations if we needed them. Very very happy with the Morae suite.

Now about moderating. I learned a ton from the discussions with my test respondents, so now i’m all lovin’ on the qualitative data. I realized I am a people person, i can be nice, and i’m not super sensative when they can’t figure out what I built — granted I just did a session with a few of our interns and I bet they thought I could fire them or something.

So basically, if you have a small budget and want to do some usability testing I highly recommend Morae. Oh and order yourself a copy of Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.

And I just wanted to give a shout out to Betsy Weber, keep evangelizing that good software, and can I get discounts on few more copies of the Observer?

Just cracked open Morae today at work, and I have to say, it is pretty rad. It doesn’t beat hiring a moderator and testing in an actual facility, but for those with a tight budget it will do the trick. Still working out the issues with creating tasks and such, but I was able to quickly setup a test plan. Tomorrow I’m going to turn the interns into lab rats and see what this software can really do.