Syntagm > Design for Usability > Services | High Quality Usability Videos

High Quality Usability Videos

We can provide high-quality digital videos of usability tests, suitable for watching on most personal computers. They have a number of benefits over video recordings made using conventional techniques:

• High-resolution recording of the screen regardless of size (for example, 1024 x 768)
• Dynamic Picture-in-Picture (explained below)
• Face-tracking

Happily, this approach adds very little to the cost of providing video recordings and is still fully portable, so can be used in either lab or home/office settings.

High Resolution Recording

With very few exceptions, conventional video recording from computer screens uses scan converters to reduce the image to fewer than 600 lines (500 in North America and other countries using NTSC). While this might have been acceptable when computer screens were only 640 x 480 pixels, common resolutions are now 1024 lines and above, resulting in considerable loss of information (as illustrated in figure 1). This means that separate still screen shots must be made if details are to be visible and that the video does not accurately represent what the user was seeing at the time.

We use software-based recording of the screen which has no theoretical upper limit on resolution. This means that viewers of the video are always seeing exactly what was displayed and that any frame can be extracted for use in a report without the need for separate still capture.

Dynamic Picture-in-Picture

Traditional picture-in-picture uses scan converters and special hardware to combine the video output of the screen with a head shot of the user, as shown in figure 1. This usually means a reduction in the quality of the screen image, and a fixed user image obscuring the screen contents whether or not it is useful to understanding the interaction.

Figure 1, Traditional Static Picture-in-Picture

We combine lossless video screen capture with the user image during post-processing to CD or DVD. This means clear, sharp screen recordings (reduced here to fit more easily on the page) with the user image only appearing when it is of interest. Furthermore, the user image can

• appear anywhere on the screen
• be moved from frame to frame
• be partially transparent

if the underlying screen contents are important. The possibilities are shown in figure 2.

Figure 2, Dynamic Picture-in-Picture Possibilities

Notice also that the background of the user image can be eliminated (as shown in figure 2), allowing more of the underlying screen image to be visible. (There are some special requirements for background removal to be fully effective. Please contact us if this is of particular interest to you.)