Review: Techsmith's Morae 2.0 ups the ante for Usability Testing Software

If you ever carry out web or software usability tests then you'll have come across Techsmith's Morae software. Techsmith has just released a major upgrade to the software, now at version 2.0. As we were just about to run a usability test for a client, we did something we'd never normally advise - we installed the new version of Morae on top of the old one the night before the test. Installation was a breeze and there were no hiccups during our test, allowing us to focus on what's new in Morae. So is it worth taking the plunge if you haven't yet invested in this software?

Morae has three separate software components. The first, ‘Recorder’, runs on the participant's computer and does the donkeywork of recording mouse clicks, keyboard presses, screen video and webcam video. The second used to be called ‘Remote Viewer’ but has now been christened ‘Observer’, and allows observers to monitor the test from another room or indeed another country (so long as you are on the same network as the recording computer) and log data. The final component, ‘Manager’, allows you to analyse the data and put together highlights videos.

As well as sporting a colourful new interface with snazzy icons, each of these components has undergone a major feature overhaul.

RECORDER: NEW SURVEY FEATURE PLUS DATA LOGGING REFINEMENTS
The most noticeable change to ‘Recorder’ is that it now allows you to present an end-of-test survey to the participant. Built in to the software is John Brooke's 'SUS' questionnaire. Brooke’s original paper described this as ‘a quick and dirty usability scale’ and unfortunately Techsmith appear to have followed this description in their implementation. The survey looks like one of those HTML emails that doesn't quite render properly in your mail reader. The radio buttons are small and close together and begging to be wrongly selected. If you don't like 'SUS', Morae allows you to create your own survey but we would have liked to be able to customise the look and feel of the survey as well. Much more useful is the extra data logging features built into ‘Recorder’, for example, you can now assign a success score for each task and a severity rating for each issue logged.

OBSERVER: BETTER DATA EDITING
As well as its name change, ‘Observer’ also has a couple of new features. By far the most useful is an editable log of all markers in the current recording. (Previously, once you had sent your marker it was irretrievable, like sending an instant message). If, like us, you sometimes make logging errors when 3-4 usability issues appear simultaneously, then you'll love this feature. However, Morae won't allow you to edit the task number associated with the ‘Start task’ marker retrospectively. Morae uses this to create a task segment in the recording and it's a critical marker for the ‘Manager’ component. So if you get it wrong while data logging you'll just have to wait until you open the file in ‘Manager’ before you can fix it. We hope the development team at Techsmith can get this fixed as soon as possible.

MANAGER: BETTER GRAPHING AND MILES PER MOUSE
But the star of the show is ‘Manager’. The interface to ‘Manager’ used to have two tabs, one to do the analysis and a second to create a highlights video. Now there's a third tab titled ‘Graph’. As well as doing the obvious (that is, creating graphs) this new tab contains features that help you carry out analyses compliant with ISO 9241's definition of usability. So there are canned graphing functions for you to calculate efficiency (time on task), effectiveness (completion rate), and satisfaction (scores from the 'SUS' survey). But there are many other metrics you can calculate too, including one that had never occurred to me in the past: mouse movement. Selecting this analysis option will calculate how far the participant's mouse travelled during the task (measured in pixels). We're not sure how useful this is just yet but it could be a great consultancy opportunity: if you divide this measure by the time on task you'll get a ‘pixels per minute’ efficiency metric, akin to a ‘miles per gallon’ metric for automobiles. So we can now measure the mpg of a web site!

MORAE 2.0: WORTH A LOOK
Prior to this release, Morae was one of the best products available for carrying out software and website usability tests. These new features make it a five-star product. At $1,495 it's expensive, but it's still cheaper than renting a usability lab for a few days. Unfortunately, there is no evaluation version but Techsmith's website contains a number of videos and screenshots that should give you a feel for the user interface.

Now we're off to create that mpg table for the FTSE 100 home pages.



David Travis is a senior consultant at Userfocus, a usability consultancy and usability training company.

Associated Link: Morae 2.0

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