Video Temporal Compression Techniques to Facilitate Usability Evaluation

Abstract

Video of users' interaction with interfaces is often collected as part of the usability evaluation process. Analyzing the video is a time-comsuming task, because of the length of the video. One way to reduce the time required to view the video is to perform a temporal compression of the video, before or during playback. Such compression, however, has to be done is a way that minimizes loss of information. This paper present a video compression technique that has the ability to reduce the time required to view a session by a factor of 10 or higher, yet maintains and highlights the features normally sought during a usability analysis. The paper introduces an algorithm, and outlines a preliminary study on the usability of our video compression.