Evaluation of recording methods for user test sessions on mobile devices

Disney Interactive produces mobile games, applications, and websites. The user research group is responsible for evaluating games and apps through user testing. We have been working on refining our video capture and streaming solutions for user tests on mobile devices. We designed this experiment to see if any of the recording methods we used were changing player behavior and impacting their gameplay performance. We assessed changes in absolute score for two different games to determine impact to player efficacy. We analyzed observational data and player self-ratings on performance, comfort, awareness, and focus. We evaluated children, young adults, and older adults. The results across all of the data were consistent and this paper explains the experiment and provides recommendations for mobile recording of user test sessions.