Advanced Common Sense

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.

From my do-it-yourself usability testing forum:

“I've designed and facilitated a dozen or so tests on startup sites over the past couple of years but the last round I did was for a large publishing company and boy was I nervous.

The results were outstanding.

One forgets how bloody fantastic it is when that behemoth of an issue shows it's face for the first time... Priceless.”

pete_blatchford in Testing Success Stories