Designer’s Entry for 29/11/07

This week I have been creating the user testing video, as well as completing the user testing report.

For the video, I needed to show the screen recording, as well as the user’s facial reactions to what was happening on screen. As we had recorded both, I thought this would be a relatively simple task to complete. However, the .avi files from the screen recording would not open correctly in my video editing software.

To get around this, I had to open the files in Quicktime, and then save them as .mov files. This then allowed me to import them into Premiere Elements 3.0 which I was going to use for editing the video.

Design wise, I chose to make the larger background image the screen recording, so that the viewer would be able to see where the cursor was going. In the bottom right corner, I would show the tester’s facial reactions. I chose this corner because this is the least used part of the screen, and I could afford to make the screen recording larger with the user video covering the corner. Although slightly intrusive, it would allow greater clarity for the screen recording.

At the end of each video clip I created a slide in Photoshop which would display the key points of each test. This summary would inform the viewer of any issues raised during each test. At the end of the video I created some credits for the team members, and also summarised the changes which would need to be made to the site.

I checked the video for errors and consistency before exporting it as MPEG 2 format. This took a large amount of time to compress, as the source files were rather large. The total length of the video is around 14 minutes, and gave a comprehensive overview of the usability test.

I have now been able to finish the usability testing report, and have uploaded the files to our online production scheduler. These all have our individual names on, and can just be printed and inserted into our submission folder which we will be doing over the next week.

The project is finally coming to a close, and now we are just making small amendments to our site. Putting the folder together will take a lot of time, and we are planning to look through each others to make sure that there is evidence for all of the learning outcomes.

Now that we have the majority of the content, I can start to put together the assets list for the site over this week. This will be a rather long task, as we have many photographs and other elements which have been given to us by both the college website administrator and by the photography students.