Live User Testing with sfSpyPlugin
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://www.screencast.com/t/nLi4Vrq9ND
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…
Possibly related posts (automatically generated):
Hey, this is great.
Great Idea! However, I think you should not spying your visitors without asking them for permission first
Maybe someone wants to add some features, tracking scrolling and the cursor, for example.
I really like it and will use it for sure.
Francois, thanks for this excellent plugin this is definitely useful
Another Yet François Made Plugin which show us how to make nice pluginz
Are you interested in XLIFF translations files for it ?
[...] Zaninotto, genial creador de plugins y coautor de la documentación de Symfony, acaba de presentar su último y espectacular plugin: [...]
@[MA]Pascal: Sure, I’d love that.
do you have plans to replays jquery by prototype?
@pawel_k: No. I believe jQuery does the job very well, and I can’t think of a reason why I would work on adapting it for Prototype.
This is pretty cool, and cheap too!
Wow!! Fantastic plugin, Francois! Thanks a lot!
[...] Live User Testing with sfSpyPlugin [...]
Great Plugin !
[...] buon Francois ha rilasciato qualche giorno fa uno dei plugin IMHO più interessanti mai sviluppati per Symfony, come suggerisce il nome, questo plugin permette [...]
I also feel like it is also useful to aid debugging when writing functional tests.
[...] Live User Testing with sfSpyPlugin [...]
François, the screencast link seems to be 404ing..
ScreenCast url opens with 404
@all: The screencast has been updated, you can now watch it again.