Quick tip: make your own iPhone usability testing sled for £5 | Hacker News Reader

Quick tip: make your own iPhone usability testing sled for £5

90percentofeverything.com

7 pointsharrybr5 comments

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While there is no general screen recorded software available for iPhone you can always modify your app to record what's going on the screen.

Now, recording user's fingers and face - that's a challenge. I do wonder if the rumored front-facing camera will help with that.

Nice idea.

Screen recording together with (i) synchronized audio recording and (ii) an overlay visualization of touchscreen activity would be enough. Picture-in-Picture video of the user's face is a nice-to-have, but not absolutely necessary.

User face is needed so that you can see "WTF?!" on their face, but that can be somewhat replaced by asking users to utter their "WTF!?" verbally, so I am not too worried about that.

What I am worried about is user finger hesitating over an area of a screen only to move to a different area and tap there, or not tap at all. I can't think of a way to fix that problem, but that's the last thing that stands between us and the remote usability testing with no special hardware on the user's side. I have many new users joining every day, I could ask any of them to become usability test subjects. Wouldn't that be super cool? no more multi-thousand dollar setups - usability for everyone! Or better yet, usable software for everyone!

Simple advice which can help break down perceived cost/difficulty barriers of usability testing is very important.

I like.

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