Use case

A usability session that turns into a report

The session with the participant is over and what is left is an hour of recording and your memory. The document comes out with the moments that matter, the screen of each one, and the moderator’s speech kept apart from the participant’s.

Record a session now free — and the participant’s recording does not leave your computer

The pain

Five participants, an hour each, and the analysis takes longer than the sessions. Rewatching to find the minute where the person got stuck is the work — and the report has to be out before the next sprint, not after.

And there is a problem research tools do not solve: the recording is personal data. A session with an external participant, a screen with real data, the face and voice of someone identifiable. Uploading that to a vendor’s cloud is a conversation with legal that a lot of research does not survive.

What comes out

A session report where you can find the moment without reopening the video:

• Moderator and participant kept apart in the transcript — the two audio channels come out labelled, and the report knows who asked what
• Mark the moment during the session: the button on the floating window forces a frame and marks it, without interrupting the person
• Participant code instead of name — the field already reads that way, because the default is what teaches anonymisation
• Redaction to anonymise whatever shows up on screen, burned into the exported image
• Clock time on every moment, to cross-check against your paper notes
• A prompt ready for the report: friction, abandonment and praise marked one by one, findings in order of severity

How to do it

1. Pick the Usability test use case in step 1.
2. Start recording before the participant shares their screen, with your microphone on.
3. During the session, use mark screen on the floating window whenever something important happens — that is what you will be looking for afterwards.
4. At the end, keep only the marked moments, fill in study and participant code, and produce the document.

What it does not do — better to know up front

It does not yet keep a video clip of the marked moment. It is the piece this case asks for most — showing the user struggling is the political currency of research — and it is the one being built: ~15 s around each mark, not the whole session.

It does not record the participant’s webcam. Only the shared screen and the two audio channels.

It does not do cross-session analysis — tags, affinity, comparing five participants. That is another product (Dovetail, Condens) and keeping the content on a server to compare sessions would erase our only advantage. The bridge to those tools is the export in Markdown, CSV and JSON.

It is not a questionnaire. SUS and NPS are forms, not capture — whoever needs them already has them.

Record a session now See the plans

A one or two-person agency fits in Personal; from three up, in Team. What decides the session — separating the channels, marking the moment and anonymising — is free.