UserVue is an application from TechSmith. At work we’ve used it recently to do remote user interviews, where we’ve had people who use our services talk us through some emailed reports they received from us.

It allows us to view and record a user’s screen, and save it as a WMV or Morae file. Additionally, it can record a phone call you have with the user. And, you can have colleagues at other computers observe the session and they can take part in an observer chat and submit notes along the way.

There’s that saying, “Hunger is the best sauce,” and I think the user experience design community has been very hungry for a tool like this. So, at the moment, I’m quite happy with UserVue.

It was quite easy to use, and it worked well.

Now, to save others some frustration, let me tell you about how it didn’t work well.

When I first tried it, everything seemed to be going great. I conducted a 1 hour interview, and at the end it seemed to save the recording. Then, when I went to view the recording, I realized that the phone call was not included in the recording! The best part of that interview was, go figure, in what was said. I was distraught.

Why? UserVue only works on Windows. I was running Windows XP Pro in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro laptop, using VMWare Fusion. Apparently, there is a problem with that configuration.

I tested UserVue on that same computer, but instead of in a virtual machine, I booted into Windows using BootCamp. UserVue worked fine that way, including recording the phone call.