StudyCaster : A Tool for Automatic and Anonymized Recording of Online User Studies

In recent years, online crowdsourcing markets like oDesk and Amazon Mechanical Turk have made it easy to recruit human subjects for online user studies, anonymously and in large numbers. A major limitation of online user studies lies in the difficulty of actually observing the actions of the subject as he or she solves the tasks presented, and much work may be necessary on the part of the experimenter in order to instrument the system under test or develop questionnaires that can shed light on the subject’s approach to the problem at hand. In this note, we present StudyCaster, a Java-based tool that allows subjects to stream complete recordings of their computer screens to an experimenter’s server with a minimum of effort. A novel and crucial feature is anonymization, which blurs any window on the screen that does not match predefined criteria. ACM Classification