Observation as a Technique for Usability Evaluation
Chris Baber, Neville A. Stanton · 1996
One could say that observation simply involves looking at something and recording what you see. The effort put into the development of usability laboratories would suggest that this definition has been taken literally; in some places, video-recording is performed in place of observation. By way of analogy, some students may spend an enormous amount of time and money photocopying papers, and appear to feel that ownership of the photocopy of an article represents, somehow, a knowledge of that article, and hence, removes the need to read it; so video-recording a person&s;s behaviour could be seen as a means of recording it, without actually observing it. No doubt there are many usability laboratories which house hours of videotape to be analysed &s;at a later date&s;. One of the reasons why this analysis often fails to materialize is the time cost involved in videotape analysis; we would estimate that 1 hour of recording could require around 10 hours of analysis. There are, however, approaches to this problem: either conduct the analysis &s;live&s;, or analyze for specific types of activity, or employ some form of computer support. Each of these approaches is considered in this chapter.