Some more context for my article on conducting remote user tests:

Learnings from conducting & coding remote user tests

1. Issues with Skype for mobile screen-share recording

• Sometimes the webcam feeds

• The format of the recorded video leaves a lot of unnecessary black space, and files are 3x as big as the Zoom ones (300 MB)

  

  A smaller screen and more dead space in Skype video recordings.

• If the mobile app of the participant is playing sounds (media audio), the video call blocks that sound. Zoom in contrast allows both audio channels at the same time. Some phones even allow the separate managing of media/call audio levels with different volume controls 😲

• The recordings are stored in the cloud. Not an issue per se, but it can take minutes for the system to process and share a longer recording in your chat. Zoom records and processes directly on you computer.

• When you download the recording there is no progress bar or other feedback. The file just grows, you can’t see when it has finished downloading.

2. A review of Otter.ai

• Time cost:
  • It's a
  • You need to manually provide some hints to the AI engine about who is speaking when for the AI matcher to learn. Overall: < 10 minutes of manual work for my 30 minutes video.
  • If you care about high accuracy, you will need to do some corrections
• Accuracy: While the transcription is really accurate, there are caveats:
  • No multi-language support, just English.
  • The speech is not always split correctly or assigned to the right speaker
  • The engine makes some decisions to omit stutter/hesitation/etc. It’s often these hesitations, “hmms”, small laughs or other expressions that are interesting to know what the participant is really thinking in a user test
• Interoperability: Otter.ai’s free version exports to simple .txt files with some configuration options. I wrote a script to transform it into something importable in Atlas TI (see next)
• Price: 10 of transcription for free monthly makes it a nobrainer for my needs. Otherwise, you pay 8.33$ for a month of 100 transcription hours.

Conclusion: Otter.ai is a really helpful tool. But you still need to rewatch the video with sound on to get all the nuances in the speech (except if some other AI tool does automatic coding. Probably 😏)

Importing plain-text transcripts into Atlas TI

See this page, I wrote some scripts to handle this problem.

Importing plain-text transcripts into Atlas TI (Otter.ai, oTranscribe)