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Key features

  • Donateware: Dataloggger is Donateware, distributed under a Creative Commons License. If you give the datalogger a try and find that it saves you time in preparation and data analysis, please make a donation and send in your ideas to support further enhancements of the tool.
  • Cross-platform: Datalogger is a PC- or Macintosh-compatible Microsoft Excel file (requires Microsoft Excel to run).
  • Customisable: You can enter participant details, task names, task order, pre- and post-test interview questions and include your own satisfaction questionnaire.
  • Regularly updated: Now at version 5.1.1. (What's new in this version?)
  • Scalable: Can be used for up to 20 participants and 50 tasks.
  • Captures quantitative data: The spreadsheet includes preset task completion scores and includes a built-in timer to record time-on-task.
  • Captures qualitative data: Allows data entry of qualitative observations for each participant and each task.
  • Provides real-time data analysis: Automatically generates charts illustrating task completion, time-on-task and user satisfaction with the product.
  • Speeds up report writing: Provides a summary of observations organised according to question and task to simplify data analysis. (No more shuffling bits of paper).
Datalogger screenshots
“What a way to make my week tremendously productive. End of the day, last day of the week, I do a quick search to see if there are any random templates lying around for capturing testing notes and stumbled onto your Data Logger. It truly IS the best thing since sliced bread. Now I can forge ahead and get the tasks ready. I'll be singing your praises for a long time...”
— Paula Thornton, User Experience Design, EDS

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please make a donation.

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What people say

“We have been using the Datalogger in our usability lab for over a year now. It is a great tool for capturing metrics and observations. We use it in conjunction with Morae to capture all necessary data from our test sessions.” — BH, USA

“Datalogger makes it easy to capture performance and satisfaction metrics, and observer comments. The resulting graphs are great for inclusion in a test summary document.” — JK, Canada

“It's really useful to have all the observation notes from the test organised in one place and Datalogger makes it easy to collate notes per task across sessions.” — UG, Sweden

“Datalogger saved us from having to write our own tool to capture metrics information. We have now standardized on Datalogger and have trained our observers on its use.” — GS, Germany

“We were comparing human performance times with mouse vs. keyboard shortcuts and building a model to simulate human performance. I was looking for software that would time tasks on its own (how I thought this would happen, I don't know!) but once reality hit, I realized that the datalogger was great so I could keep time on my own and compare it to the time on our videotape.” — KN, USA

Download Excel datalogger

Latest version: 5.1.1 (August 4th 2008). (What's new in this version?)

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About the author

Todd Zazelenchuk

Dr. Todd Zazelenchuk (@ToddZazelenchuk on Twitter) holds a BSc in Geography, a BEd, an MSc in Educational Technology and a PhD in Instructional Design. Todd is an associate of Userfocus and works in product design at Plantronics in Santa Cruz, CA where he designs integrated mobile, web, and client-based software applications that enhance the user experience with Plantronics' hardware devices.


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Todd ZazelenchukDr. Todd Zazelenchuk (@ToddZazelenchuk on Twitter) holds a BSc in Geography, a BEd, an MSc in Educational Technology and a PhD in Instructional Design. Todd is an associate of Userfocus and works in product design at Plantronics in Santa Cruz, CA.