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Usability testing videos are an eye-opener. Jakob Nielsen presented a few video clips on last weeks “Usability Dagene 2005”. Today he made one of them public available in his new alertbox Talking-head video is boring online.

Jakob’s point is that recent eyetracking studys show that people gaze away from the talking head, instead keeping an eye on video controls and background details (in this video, a road sign). I think the article is very good (even though that during the conference he said that these findings were only preliminary).

Other blogs (Sync2Play, OffOnATangent, Usernomics, ChristianSarkar) are already commenting on the article. But I think that there is a more important point here: Use video clips to make your points.

Video clips makes its points

In my job, I have witnessed the same experience: Recently I helped a customer in the public sector with a website. We (the development team) analyzed and prototyped. We came up with the best ideas we could within the limits of contract. We defined the logical flow. We took into account anything the business experts knew about the end-users.

When the prototype was ready, we tested. The test showed us some things (which i can not mention here) we had taken for granted. “They can figure this out”. “The users already know this”. We presented this for the decision makers as a plain paper report. On that background management decided to continue with no changes. It seemed that our paper argument was not strong enough. At a later user test we videotaped everything. Management never saw it, because of two reasons. Two reasons which I think are some of the biggest mistakes:

1. Management never showed up at the usertest. We had sent them invites stressing the value of a usertest.
2. Management did not want to see video clips afterwards. We wanted to make a small 2 minute video with the worst findings in the test, but they never allowed time to edit that video.

I learned something from this. I guess that next time I’ll not ask permission to edit video — I’ll assume that it’s part of the usertest.

The Jakob Nielsen presentation at “Usability dagene 2005” really convinced me of the value of video clips. He used video to make his points. I’m sure our project team could have used video clips for making our points. The best, of course is still to be present at the user test. Second to that, I’ll say that video clips are the best for convincing your project team and management.

Let your end-users make their points with videoclips. They know better than you. They know better than management.

Technorati tags: usability usertesting video jakokbnielsen

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 23:51 (GMT-1) and is filed under Links, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.