RUI: Recording user input from interfaces under Windows and Mac OS X

Abstract

Timing records of the way users interact with applications can lead to useful insights into human behavior and an application's usability. Timing records can be useful for comparing different software applications and are also necessary for building and testing user models.Westerman et al. (1996) described three different methods through which user information can be obtained. The first method, using videotape or a human recorder, is not always feasible. The video recording must be analyzed, and the human recorder has known limitations. Camtasia (TechSmith) is an example of a tool to record and replay user interactions as a video file. However, timing information cannot be directly obtained, and the tool creates logs that, being videos, are resource intensive.The second method, instrumentation, is the augmentation of an interface so that it records the user's actions. This approach can be used only if the system studied includes logging or can be modified to include logging, so it is not a general solution; information collected in this way is limited to software that can be instrumented. For example, some commercial applications, such as Microsoft Word and many games, cannot be instrumented to record user behavior.The third method is to include an unobtrusive application that exists in the background, can be used generically across all applications, and can record and timestamp user behavior. In this article, we introduce such a program: Recording User Input (RUI), which belongs to the set of programs known as keystroke logging tools. Several such tools currently exist, but there are few that record both mouse and key events and even fewer that give logs in a form that would be useful to researchers and practitioners of human-computer interaction. Several of these recording and playback tools can be downloaded from the Web, but typically these were developed as malicious "spyware" to provide keystroke logs without timing information.A tool similar to RUI was developed (Westerman et al., 1996) for the Windows 3.1 platform, but it appears no longer to be available. MICELAB (Baccino & Kennedy, 1995) is another similar tool, but it does not run on modern computers, although Baccino and Kennedy's analysis approach is still helpful in analyzing mouse movements. Another tool, InputLogger, can be used to obtain user interactions across generic interfaces, but it works only on the Classic Macintosh (pre-Mac OS X) platform (Trewin, 1998). Several large commercial products are also available. Description of RUIRUI is a keystroke and mouse action logger for the Windows (2000 and XP) and Mac OS X (10.3 and later versions) platforms. RUI's user interface includes options for which types of actions to record, including keystrokes and mouse movements. The data collected is stored in a log file (see Figure 1) as a list of the timestamps, actions, and arguments (if any), such as key pressed or move location. To start and stop recording, the hot keys Ctrl R and Ctrl S, respectively, are provided. The amount of data recorded with...

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