Re: [Usability] Usability study for GNOME on netbooks?

[Celeste Lyn Paul <celeste kde org>]

On Sunday 26 April 2009 12:40:15 am Dan Fitek wrote:

> One last thing.  I'm not sure how many participants will be interested in
> having their session video posted on the internet.  We didn't ask ours, but
> I'm fairly certain that most would have said no.  I also wonder if knowing
> that it was to be posted online would affect their behavior.  This is an
> interesting dilemma with open source usability projects.  It's obviously
> important for developers to see the actual video from the sessions, or at
> least highlights, but there are privacy issues.

You bring up an excellent point of privacy with regards to posting the video. 
It is one thing for participants to agree to be recorded for research 
purposes, and another to be recorded for publication.

Honestly, video highlights are seen as a marketing tool first, and a a support 
tool afterwards. The purpose of video is to record the usability session so 
the researcher can go back and check a participant's comment or review a 
behavior. A highlight reel can be created to give a visual presentation of 
what happened in the test, but the same data appears in the report. Video is 
just a compelling marketing tool for those hard to convince people. The data 
is sometimes delivered to the client who likes to keep archives, but most of 
my clients never ask for it or a highlight reel which just costs money to 
produce with little added value.

It's become popular to post raw usability footage for everyone to see because, 
well, we share everything in open source. But what value does it bring? The 
footage still needs to be interpreted by someone who has experience 
interpreting user behavior, and there are few of those people in open source. 
Instead you get a whole lot of people watching the videos and drawing their 
own conclusions which may or may not match the experts. You just end up with 
usability FUD.

Since highlights *are* a compelling marketing tool, something like that is 
probably fine. However, you also need to inform participants that their image 
will be released on the internet to give them the option to opt out.

-- 
Celeste Lyn Paul
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org