Retrospective Cued Recall: A Method for Accurately Recalling Previous User Behaviors

Mapping Interactive Experience Over Time

“…For example, Russell and Oren developed Retrospective Cued Recall (RCR): a passively capturing of the computer desktop screen when users interact with the web browser (D.M. Russell and Oren 2009). The screenshots became the references in a delayed review, regarding the search engine user behaviors happened several weeks ago.…”

Real-World User Experience: Engaging Students and Industry Professionals Through a Mentor Program

“…Students then uploaded these reflections to Blackboard. These activity questions and responses also served as a record and prompt in the manner of a "retrospective recall" method for priming study participants to think about their recent use of a particular tool (Russell & Oren, 2009). I could also refer students to their individual activity reflections to initiate discussions specific to the syllabus in later classes.…”

ScreenTrack: Using a Visual History of a Computer Screen to Retrieve Documents and Web Pages

“…Researchers have made effective use of the capability to recall and recognize visual images in a productive setup. One approach to reconstructing a past working context is to provide users with memory cues in the form of visual information in chronological order, such as by writing "biographies" with icons [34], recording video footage of an office environment [13,35], archiving a user's web browsing history [51], or identifying task boundaries in programming environments [52]. Some systems provide multimodal replay (viz., visual and symbolic), which can not only help users recover context visually, but also retrieve a symbolic state for learning or collaboration [18,21,37,59].…”

“…Some systems provide multimodal replay (viz., visual and symbolic), which can not only help users recover context visually, but also retrieve a symbolic state for learning or collaboration [18,21,37,59]. In particular, retrospective cued recall, which uses screen recordings of computing tasks, has been employed as a usability testing method and found to be accurate even with lengthy delays [7,50,51]. Recently, Rule et al reconfirmed the benefits of using a visual history for mental reconstruction and enumerated the design implications of such software by exploring various design options (animation vs. still image, screenshot size, crop region) and their effects [49].…”

“…We prototyped the method in ScreenTrack(Figure 1), a desktop application which records screenshots and lets users open digital resources present in the screenshots. We draw ideas from previous works that use a series of computer screenshots, or thumbnails of applications, to help users reconstruct their mental context [30,[48][49][50][51]. ScreenTrack takes screenshots regularly, at a user-specified interval (e.g., every 10 seconds) to record current computer activities.…”