Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Remote Shadowing

If visiting people is out of the question, you can ask them to start their screen-recording software, let it run for half a day or so while they work, and then have them send you the resulting movie. At first, this sounds like it would create immensely large movie files. Fortunately, there are a few factors working to our advantage:

• You can record at a low frame rate. In almost all cases, a frame rate of one or two pictures per second is plenty to tell you what the user is doing.

• You don’t need to see all the details, so you can scale the image down to about 30 percent of the screen’s full resolution and use a strong compression setting.

• You probably don’t need sound at all.

• Most of the time, only small parts of the screen change ...