Technical Translation: Usability Strategies for Translating Technical Documentation

Screen Logging Software 
While user satisfaction questionnaires and video recording go some way to 
helping us understand the relationship between users and a system, they 
only provide part of the overall picture. To fully understand users’ perform-
ance as they carry out tasks, it is necessary to see what they are doing on-
screen, i.e. to observe how they actually interact with the system. 
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pendent tasks as is the case in this study (as discussed on page 217). It was, 
number of reasons. Firstly, in the absence of a separate observation room 
(see page 186), it was felt that a form of direct observation was necessary for a 

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Experiment to Test the Impact of Iconic Linkage
Obviously, it would be ill-advised to sit beside the participants and look 
over their shoulders as they work, not least because it may affect their per-
formance. It would also be physically impractical and would leave us with 
no permanent record of events. Some solutions proposed involve position-
ing a video camera in such a way that it can record events taking place on-
screen (Preece 1994:619). Other solutions involve connecting an additional 
monitor to the computer being used by the participant. Known as a slave 
monitor, it is usually located in another room and shows what is happening 
on the participant’s screen. This approach can be combined with a video 
camera to provide a permanent record of events. Neither method is par-
ticularly attractive because of the additional hardware and technical re-
quirements. 
Another approach is to use some form of software logging tool (Preece 
1994: 626-627). At their most basic, logging tools can record the keystrokes 
key 
key
ing menus, selecting items, highlighting text or clicking icons. At the 
benefits of interaction logging and video recording.
One such product is 
Morae
by Techsmith. This product allows usability 
researchers to produced synchronised screen and video recordings, observe 
and mark critical moments and analyze, edit and share recordings. The 
software can also be used to record audio produced, for example, during 
think-aloud protocols. As regards user activities, Morae can be used to re-
cord changes to web pages, mouse clicks, keyboard input and, using the 
Remote Viewer, on-screen text and markers. Using such a product would 
undoubtedly be of great benefit, however, the cost of such a product 
(around USD$1100 at time of writing) is prohibitively expensive for many 
people unless they are making a significant investment in usability research. 
A more feasible approach is to use stand-alone screen-recording software 
to record real-time moving images of the events taking place on-screen. 
Generally, such tools are used to create online training tutorials but they 
can just as easily be used for the purposes of a usability study. There are 
several products all of which provide much the same functions such as 
My 
Screen Recorder
, 
Matchware
, 
Camtasia 
and 
HyperCam
were evaluated. 
However, 
Camtasia
, which his produced by the same people who make 
Morae
, is one of the more suitable options because of its superior function-
ality, ease of use, image quality and portability. 
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Unfortunately, such products only record actions carried out using the
opposite end of the spectrum there are sophisticated tools which take the 
board – they do not record actions carried out using the mouse, e.g. open-
that is pressed to give an insight into the time taken to perform tasks. 
made by users. More advanced versions also record timestamps for each

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Assessing Usability 
Camtasia Studio 
is a suite of tools for recording screen events as well as 
editing and producing “movies”. These tools make it possible to add anno-
tations, audio files, text etc. to recordings. The suite also includes a proprie-
tary player which is used for showing recordings (the recordings can also be 
played using Microsoft Media Player although the image quality is much 
better using the Camtasia player). 
Recordings are stored in AVI format and with standard compression lev-
els produce perfect quality files; average file sizes are approximately 1MB 
per minute of recording. There is also a “pack and go” facility which allows 
high-quality playback of recordings without the need to install Camtasia. 
The recording tool can be used to specify the precise area of the screen to 
be recorded – any section of the screen from a dialog box to a window to 
the entire visible screen area can be selected. Once Camtasia was installed 
on the PC, separate folders for storing the recordings were created for each 
participant. 
The benefit of using Camtasia is that it records everything that takes 
place on-screen – even when text is entered. Camtasia cannot, however, 
record when function keys or keyboard shortcuts are used – it only records 
the results of such actions provided they have a visual consequence which is 
displayed on the screen. However, because DigiLog is a mouse and menu-
driven application, this is not a problem. What is more, Camtasia records all 
actions performed on a PC, not just those carried out in DigiLog. Thus, 
when users switch between applications or windows or when they use the 
Start 
menu, Camtasia will record it. 
Also, because Camtasia features an elapsed time counter, it is possible to 
calculate the time spent performing tasks and subtasks, simply by measuring 
the time between the start of the task (or when the mouse first moves) and 
the end of the task (when the pointer stops). Each task can be labelled using 
the effects tool, e.g. a banner can be added to the recording for the duration 
of a particular task.