Screencasting Tips and Tricks
Tips and Tricks to make good screencasting - Screencast demonstration

For usability testing on an application, a system or a Website, users are trying to finish the assigned task on computer. It is an important part to recording what users do on screen and publishing the process as videos for analysis. The content of videos can include screen activity such as mouse movement and click, page scroll and keystroke.

A video of these mouse movements, keystrokes, and other activities is most helpful for usability testing. Without good observational skills, it is difficult to remember what happened in the test. A video of screen recording not only helps you recall what happened on the screen, it provides more details to analyze and compare the processes between individuals.

There are various Windows screen recorder available. Most of them are free to try before buy and some of them with simple recording feature are even free. You can choose the one fits your need.

Screen recording software will slows down your computer performance more or less, but it is the best way to do the recording of the desktop compared to camcorder or VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). Besides, now hardware requirements are no longer the hurdle as they used to be.

The following requirements of screen recording software can satisfy most usability testing situations:

Optimize recording settings. Recording at lower frame rate and lower resolution(like 800?600) in lower color depth(16-bit color)has no obvious impact on system performance. If you can disable your hardware acceleration, you can get better result.

Unobtrusive recording. Most of the tools will not completely disappear while recording, but they all reduce to a small icon in the toolbar. And now a few screen recorders enable users to hide the system tray icon. So users will not be distracted or feel anxiety by being reminded of recording.

Instant playback. In this technique usability test, users are doing the assigned task and their screen activities are in recording. When the task is completely they are shown the video and asked to conduct a think aloud. It?? best to watch the video right after the test to minimize forgetting.

Pause, Fast Forward, and Rewind. Some common video formats are nice because they can be played with video player. Some of the tools use a special video format with special player should have a pause feature and preferably fast-forward and rewind.

Here were a few other features for usability testing but they are not critical.

Record Sound. If the usability testing is concern with audio, it will be better to get a screen recording application with sound recording feature to do the recording. And now more and more applications supports sound recording from multiple sources such as Microphone, Rear Input, and Stereo Mix. And it can be used to record the interview dialogue after session with participants.

Editing feature. This enables users to edit callouts to illustrate some special procedures in the recorded video after the test. Some notes can be added according to the after test interview.

Hotkeys. To minimize futzing in testing sessions, hotkeys for important commands like Record, Pause, Play, and Stop is a useful feature.

Screen recording software is mainly designed for creating software tutorials and system demos. However, it can be a useful tool for usability testing. And now more and more requirements of usability test are considered in the design of screen recording software.

People may think there is one limitation to the software approach - it only records what happens on the screen but users themselves. If you want to learn something from the body language and physical movements of the user then youl still need a camcorder. Now the good news is some screen recorders also support the webcam recording and picture-in-picture video. They can record the video of your webcam while recording screen activity.