Doing user testing is more or less like watching users interact with an application. sfSpyPlugin allows you do to it online and for free, instead of paying a lot for doing it for real.

User testing is usually a long and expensive process that few organizations can afford. You must recruit users, write scenarios, animate the tests, record browsing sessions, and visualize the tapes. What if you could just choose some of the users currently using the application online, start recording their actions, and playback their way through the application later? That’s what the new sfSpyPlugin offers.

See it in action: One browser window is “spying” another browser window - but that could very well be two different computers. Click on the following link to see a 2 minutes screencast of the plugin in action.

http://screencast.com/t/tnhx8kBl5P1

The plugin displays a list of the online users on any symfony application. You can choose to watch online or record for later the actions of any user. The replay interface offers VCR-like controls to pause, restart, accelerate or slow down the playback. You can also organize your recordings by giving them a name. The interface should be pretty self-explanatory, and yet there is a complete installation and usage guide available at the symfony project wiki.

And if you are not of the point-and-click type, you can always trigger the recording from code, to watch how a certain user uses the application, or how a certain module of the application is used.

This way, you can watch and monitor how users interact with your application, or part of it. The only think you will miss is the voice of the user commenting what he/she is doing. I created this plugin so that you have no excuse to let live applications having a poor usability without doing anything to improve them…