Basically, my issue with Morae is that you can’t take “free text” notes and have them associated with the timeline automatically every time you reach a new line. Morae supposes that you have predefined your markers, i.e. the type of issue your users are going to experience before the session. The way I work is that I define the types of issue after running all the sessions, not before. And the type of issue is very specific to the project in hand.

The way we currently get around this is to take observational notes in MS Word, and insert a timestamp (using a macro) whenever anything interesting happens. After the study we then go back into Morae Manager and do a search for the RRT entry for that time (recorded because the time is displayed in the system tray).

The style of notes we take is basically a transcript of what’s said and done, loosely combined with the observer’s interpretations and thoughts. Whenever something particularly interesting happens, the observer usually types a string of ************s, the number of stars roughly representing the level of importance. This is how we find appropriate segments for the highlight videos. I should add that the majority of user studies we do are qualitative. There’s not much point in getting carried away with numbers if you’ve only got a dozen users.