When doing usability studies on websites or Windows or OSX applications, it’s easy to see what’s going on on-screen since you can just split the video signal to a display in another room and into some recording equipment. However, when doing usability studies on mobile apps, it can even be hard for the moderator to see what’s going on, since mobile device screens are relatively small and participants have a propensity to move them around as they perform their tasks.

For our latest mobile app project, I decided to get creative about how we record and allow remote observers for our sessions. We don’t have a big hardware or software budget for usability equipment, plus, I’m thrifty.

I put together a pretty reasonable workflow that worked really well this past week.
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