TapeFailure - Watch your users use your site

This is a very useful piece of software!

While doing usuability tests is a great way to try to figure out what people are going to do with your software, the users are always going to be acting differently because they know their being watched. They know that they're supposed to be figuring it out, so they try to be "smarter" about how to do things.. As a result, they end up not giving you the sort of real usage information that you'd like.

The real problem with this is the privacy- While you have all of this information anyway- You're not learning anything new, it's corrolates it in a way that users are unlikely to be comfortable with. Image if the headline read "Microsoft secretly recording all users who use it's site"

It would get major play, even though they already have all that information in logs.

I think that something like TF is certainly useful- Hell, imagine being able to forward Dev specific users gettng confused, to try to prove a UI point.. We (service providers) just need to come up with a way to make it fair.

Center Networks got some invites for this company so if you want to try it out go to the link and ask for one.

http://www.centernetworks.com/we-have-tapefailure-invites-to-the-private-beta

I wouldn't have the balls to put "failure" in the name of my startup.

Isn't there a bit of a privacy issue here? If your site involves logging in, wouldn't TapeFailure record the user typing in their username and password?