Ron, thanks for the announcement and your work on the VULab. It sounds
like it can become a valuable resource.
I'm wondering if the VULab is a resource that can be used by other
open source communities that may be related to Fluid. I'm thinking
specifically of Drupal (http://drupal.org) and OpenID (http://
openid.net) communities, that I have been encouraging to contribute to
and benefit from Fluid's work.
Would it be OK to share your "alpha" announcement more widely?
On Jan 5, 2009, at 5:26 PM, Ron Owston wrote:
I am pleased to announce that we now have an end-to-end working
alpha version of VULab at http://vulab.yorku.ca.
You can create your own login as a "researcher" and then create a
login for a "tester". Then login as the researcher and create a new
"project." A project consists of a pre- and a post-session survey
and the url that you want a "tester" to visit. At the end of project
creation you assign the tester to the project and activate the
project. Then login again as a researcher and view your tester's
video and survey responses.
I have prepared a 3-part video explaining the steps in conducting a
study with VULab at http://vimeo.com/channel26973 . I urge you to
view the video before attempting to use the tool, especially video
Part 1 that explains how to create a survey which at this point is
still somewhat idiosyncratic.
For those of you unfamiliar with the application, VULab is designed
for remote usability testing. VULab records, on its server, remote
users’ interactions with a web site. The application also has a
built in survey tool that allows researchers to ask users questions
at the beginning and end of their usability testing session. The
data collected on the VULab server then can be analyzed by the
researcher to identify usability issues with the website. A unique
feature of the application is that it does not require remote users
to install the software application on their computer as they only
need to download a small Java applet at the time of the session. All
recording is done on the server.
Known issues with VULab:
1. the captured video plays back too quickly. I suggest using a
video player that allows you to reduce the playback speed eg. with
VLC hit the minus key several times (and turn off the sound
beforehand).
2. audio and video aren't synching properly yet.
3. work still needs to be done on the layout and css of the web
interface.
4. exporting of survey data not yet implemented.
5. uploading of screen snapshots is fairly slow--it takes at least
as long to upload as the length of the user's visit to the website
being tested. The user can't take the post-session survey until the
upload is completed.
You can report back any issues to this list, but Colin is creating
the list [email protected] which will take most of the
traffic related to end user experiences. This will be announced
shortly.
And finally, Happy 2009, to all members of the Fluid community and
thanks for the support you've given our project over the past year!
Ron Owston
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