We’ve been looking around the web for Usability Testing software. In South Africa, most web development companies just plain don’t do usability testing – which would be fine except that most web development companies in South Africa aren’t that clued up about basic usability and user-centred design practices either. We’re also guilty – at best we do ad hoc testing using the client, friends and colleagues, backed up by a fairly in-depth understanding of basic usability practices.

The general opinion on Usability Testing in South Africa is that clients aren’t interested in it – that it’s impossible to justify the cost. This past week I’ve met with 3 clients, all of whom have easily understood and recognised that their website must give their business some return – either directly by making sales or indirectly by resulting in enquiries, and that to do that they need to think about their users first. They all understood that they didn’t need a website design – they need an online strategy to engage with their customers. And that means understanding user-centred design and information structures, and doing usability testing.

So we’re looking to do more, and so we’re looking for Usability Testing software.

Usability Software captures video of the user being tested, and the site that the user is testing, and places that in a picture-in-picture video. The plan being that this allows you to see how users use the website through both their verbal and facial comments, and through the clicks that they make.

We found Silverback from Clearleft, which is both not insanely expensive and is fully featured. Only problem is its only available on Mac. Most users in South Africa – and I mean up around 90% –  are sitting with a 19-inch flat screen, set at 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600, running IE 6 or 7. If I place them in front of Safari on a Mac, they’re going to be completely distracted: “Where’s the close button?”. We’ve even considered asking users to bring their own mouse – the most disconcerting thing about a new computer? You are not fluent with your new mouse.

We found Morae from TechSmith, and that costs $2000, which in South Africa today translates to R19000. That’s just way too much, especially for the basic testing that we need – we’re just not doing projects that warrant extensive testing of new ways of interacting with data.

So we looked at TechSmith’s other products and found Camtasia. This is the basic picture-in-picture bundle, without the huge amount of extra features that Morae offers. We’ll see how this goes.