Developing roles and developing guidelines ... Observers have a vital role to play both during
the sessions and later in the process of analysing, articulating and disseminating the findings to others. Seeing how
participants have received a particular element of software design can be extremely illuminating for academics, editors, librarians, software designers, graphic designers, cartographers, and producers etc, all of whom can play a role at some point in the development of software resources. The interests of these various stakeholders in both the pedagogic and the software design of the resource must be accommodated by the process and can influence how the evidence is used.
Some will observe and play an active part in the video data capture
recording session as a synchronous, 'live' event. Some may, in fact, be both observer and participant, learning from a reflexive use of video evidence. Others will have the video evidence presented to them as an asynchronous event after the original recording, offering a reflective use of it for stakeholders in the design of the software resource. The value of the video evidence lies in ‘showing’ real experiences of software resources in use to the range of players who might expect to become involved in the process of software creation.
As the role of those involved in the process of video data capture has evolved so have the guidelines that are followed by the growing number of groups using the technique. This paper offers these guidelines as advice on various process elements that can lead to the production of usable video evidence, including:
the choice of appropriate participants that will be able to provide usable evidence
the ordering of participants to help get the best out of recording sessions
how to get permission from your participants to use the data that they provide
issues relating to data protection.
Video data capture does not require large numbers of participants to be involved; an understanding of which data capture paradigm will best inform your needs will help you to decide how many participants a particular investigation needs. Nielsen (1994) suggests that "it is possible to run user tests without sophisticated labs, simply by bringing in some real users, giving them some typical test tasks, and asking them to think out loud while they perform the tasks", but to do so without video capture would rob the process of the evidence for any later, asynchronous use.