Powerful. Professional.

The year was 2007

Morae was one of the first projects I ever worked on professionally. While this might be a great reason to not include it in my portfolio - I'm actually still quite proud of some of the interactions I helped to create. While the visuals may be a bit of an anachronism for today, the functionality is still rich and impressive.

Here are a few of my favorite aspects

Power & Simplicity - The Holy Grail

When we started building the reporting engine in Morae, we wanted to be certain new users could rapidly generate useful, insightful reports based on their usability test recording. However, there were many types of reports that could be generated: user input, time on task, task success, app interaction, errors, etc...

Rather than created a large amount of dialogs to navigate through and introducing a large amount of concepts to digest at once, I helped to come up with a simpler UI presentation. Utilizing a custom pattern that maximizes the concept of progressive disclosure, this reporting UI allowed users to generate meaningful reports in 3 clicks, with a large amount of customization available when needed. 

To prove the viability of the design, I created an interactive Flash prototype to demonstrate the interactions and test them rapidly. 

Ultimately, user success went through the roof with this design.

Untangling Features & Flexibility 

Morae is a professional tool with a surprisingly enormous amount of functionality. At times, the functionality conflicted. Having one setting selected in one place would affect settings in another. I was brought back onto the team in 2008 to help untangle the mess and improve learnability.

While streamlining features in some areas solved a lot of the challenges, ultimately we needed to explore new UI methods in order to communicate the functionality.

By developing a rich, fully functional C# based prototype, I illustrated a new interaction concept that directly solved the challenges within the Morae Study and Recorder configuration.

Making Your Analysis a Little Easier

Let's face it... Usability test videos can be long, repetitive and watching them all can take a ton of time. So the Morae team set out to change that.

Variable Speed Playback

Sometimes those videos just take a little too long to watch. So watching them at 1.75x speed can help you get a lot more done, in a lot shorter time.

This toggle button UI was a perfect solution, combining the functionality of quickly turning the variable speed on and off, while also being able to customize the exact playback speed.

Rich Event Searching and Filtering