Silverback Review: Guerilla Usability Testing
About a year ago, I found a pretty cool application that I”ve recently unearthed again. Silverback is a user testing application for Macs only that makes use of the iSite hardware installed on the Mac to let you create a spiffy portable user for your guerilla testing exploits.
Using this application is quite simple. Within 60 seconds I had my first project set up, my first user profile created and was running a test of a client product. The most exciting part came when I ended the first test and exported the QT movie file that was created. Wow! Powerful stuff to immediately show developers how peeps are interacting with the app!Opening up the movie I was greeted by a full scale representation of my desktop, along with a picture-in-picture view of the user in the lower right hand corner.
The application recorded everything that the webcam could see for facial reactions as well as audio from my Macbook”s built in microphone. The screencast of the entire desktop allowed for me to watch what the user was doing as well as reported any clicks with small overlaid circles.This type of basic user testing functionality built into my laptop and organized neatly in one application is pretty freakin” cool. It’s a great substitute for anyone without a dedicated testing lab — and even if you do have one; it makes for an awesome portable test station. The really nice thing about this tool is that once you launch Silverback, the user has no feedback whatsoever that they are being recorded. Their experience is as though they are just using the application on a machine. The tester can use surreptitiously use a Mac remote to pause, start and stop the recording, and even to create jump-to highlights that show up in the rendered movie. While there is a lot of good stuff in what Silverback tracks in the movies, it is not a good tool for keeping textual or data records,even though there is a large text input field provided for notes that can be entered from the interface for whatever you may need. If you’re administering a user test and have specific tasks a user should go through, you could provide them verbally and they would be picked up by the microphone and into the video — but note, you will not be able to make test highlights compilations easily with this tool.
Being Mac only is a real bummer. Every user test I’ve ever facilitated was done on a PC…it’s still the majority and people that use them get easily thrown off by something as simple as the ctrl vs. apple keys. I have even tried running on the parallels side of my Mac for testing, but that is still very clunky for novice PC users. So Silverback is a good tool for quick and dirty UX tests on a Mac. I intend to use it with that audience on specific applications — like Facebook apps where the browser is the interface, and folks can work on my laptop when I hijack them at Starbuxx…. Here is another really cool use for Silverback that I have just started doing: Client demos about how to access their analytics:
Silverback_Demo from Julie Booth on Vimeo.
This is a demonstration using the Silverback application on a MacBook. Demo of Google Analytics segment feature.
Analytics segment feature.P.S. You can download for free, but if you are going to use it, please buy the license for 49 bucks.
Proceeds benefit GorillaFund dot Org
