One of the best ways to understand someone’s perspective is to follow along as they go through an experience - but that can pose a challenge for researchers! In person experiences may require researchers to be physically present and online experiences can be difficult to capture. And the challenge is even greater now given the current climate where both actions and interactions are limited to the online world. Recollective knew there had to be a better solution when it comes to understanding the exact process that people go through when completing a task online. Enter – the Screen Recording Task.
In today’s blog we will address the following elements of the Screen Recording Task:
- What is the Screen Recording Task?
- What can you do with the Screen Recording Task?
- Screen Recording Task: Data Visualizations
What is the Screen Recording Task?
Housed within our popular Multimedia Task, the Screen Recording Task allows you to present participants with an assignment or mission and then follow along by having them record their audio and screen.
Participants will have the option to choose whether to share their entire screen, a particular application window, or even a specific tab of that application.
Participants will then be prompted by their browser to allow microphone access, and once enabled, the screen recording will begin. The video will then capture everything participants do within their desktop window while the audio picks up their narration of the experience.
Configuration
When adding a Screen Recording Task to your Recollective Study, you will have the ability to customize different elements of the Task to best suit your needs.
To start, you have the option to require a specific number of Screen Recordings per Task. This will enable you to set a minimum of at least one or increase the requirement for instances where you need participants to record their screen multiple times. For example, you might want to have participants walk through a multi-step process and have each step be its own recording.
Similar to the Photo and Video Tasks within Recollective, you also have the ability to add or require a text description to go along with each Screen Recording. This enables the participant to provide a title, caption or description for each of their Screen Recordings. You can even customize the prompt to provide additional instruction on what should be included in the text description. This will help ensure that participants are providing you with the information you need relative to each recording.
Finally, since it's apart of the Multimedia task, you have the ability to include additional response options to go along with the Screen Recording, including text, photo, video, and file upload. This will provide participants with the ability to choose how they want to respond, or enforce different response options to either ask different questions or gather different formats of data for the same question.
What can you do with the Screen Recording Task?
Now lets take a look at a few examples of ways you could use the Screen Recording Task within your research study:
Online Shop-Along
Maybe you’re running a study for an online shopping website and you’re trying to better understand consumers' experiences as they navigate the site and go through their decision making process. You can use the Screen Recording Task to direct participants to the online shopping website of your choice and watch as they go through their path to purchase from beginning to end, listening as they vocalize their thought process on what they’re trying to achieve and the highs and lows of their journey.
User Experience Testing
Let’s say you’re doing a project for a health insurance company that just launched a new section on their website designed to inform people about a new benefits policy. They want to make sure that the information is accessible and that the site is easy to navigate. To do this, you can use a Screen Recording Task to send participants to this website with the goal of answering a specific question about the new policy and see how long it takes them to find the answer—all while watching how they navigate through the pages and listening to their commentary to better understand their experience.
Or maybe your client is a video game company that wants to test the latest release of their most popular computer game; you could use the Screen Recording Task to capture each participant’s experience as they play, allowing you to identify the exact areas that players enjoyed or ran into issues.
Screen Recording Task: Data Visualizations
Similar to video uploads, screen recording responses benefit from Recollective's automated video transcription feature: within a few minutes of upload, a complete audio transcript is appended to the response for detailed analysis.
The transcription feature is available in over 100 languages, and each transcript can be edited to ensure slang, jargon, or muffled words appear correctly.
The transcript can also be highlighted to create excerpts, which will create both text snippets and video clips for export. Excerpts can be coded and categorized by theme or topic for even easier analysis and visualization:
Overall, the Screen Recording Task provides researchers the opportunity to gather detailed, in-the-moment qualitative input from participants without the logistical burden of setting up synchronous research. Using the Screen Recording Task can get you answers to questions you never even thought to ask by allowing participants to show you exactly what their experience looks like, and narrate their entire thought process along the way.
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