Automatically recording keystrokes in public clusters with RUI: issues and sample answers
Jong W. Kim, Frank E. Ritter · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2007
Researchers often need to measure and collect timing characteristics of task performance (e.g., response latency and task completion time). These timing records provide a description of user behavior. This can be done using commercial behavior software, or it can be done with RUI (Recording User Input), a tool to timestamp user behavior (mouse movements, mouse clicks, and keystrokes) in an unobtrusive way (Kukreja, Stevenson, & Ritter, 2006). Here, we present a potential problem when using RUI and similar tools and a sample answer to efficiently use software to investigate human behavior when working in public clusters. A Problem when Using RUI in Public Clusters Using RUI in a study in a naturalistic setting raises new issues. The first issue is that recording can cause a problem when it is used in a public cluster (e.g., a computer classroom). A university policy should and Penn State’s policy does prohibit installing any tool for experimentation that obtains a user’s identifying information (e.g., a login id or password). The Mac RUI version does not encode material typed into secure text fields, but the Windows RUI captures all keystrokes. This concern prohibits RUI from being installed in public computers in a public directory. Installation is restricted to a temporary directory while running each study session. This causes a repetitive and time-consuming burden on an experimenter when running a study in public clusters. Here is an example case. We have been using computers at a classroom to measure users ’ learning and forgetting on a spreadsheet task. Thus, we had to install RUI every session for each subject. For the study, we had to do the following repetitive procedures: (1) Insert a CD containing study environments (e.g., RUI and spreadsheet files) (2) Copy those folders and files onto the local drive of each computer (3) Open Emacs (4) Create and configure the.emacs file: