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Website Usability Testing: Guide To The Best Professional Usability Testing Tools And Services

Website usability testing is a troubleshooting methodology that helps you discover specific ambiguities, pitfalls or issues in your website design and interface that spoil the effective use, legibility and navigation of your web pages. If you want to improve the user experience on your website, in this MasterNewMedia guide you can find all the best paid-for commercial website usability testing tools now available on the market.


Heat map of Google homepage

At a very basic level, website usability testing does not require any special equipment or software. In fact, you just need someone (a friend or even a random user) that is kind enough to spend a few minutes on your website while trying to carry out a specifically assigned task. While the selected tester navigates your website, you look at her and jot down her comments and what she likes / dislikes about your design.

Your goal is to uncover all those elements in your website layout that are ambiguous and confuse your typical reader, slow her down, or, at worst, forbid her to carry out specific critical actiona like purchasing a product, downloading a file or finding specific document.

If you are building a new website from scratch or you are thinking of redesigning your existing website layout, usability testing is a very effective way to gain useful insights into how to best organize your content layout and site navigation for your readers.

But while this approach works well if you just need minor design refinements or have little time to spend on usability testing, if you are serious about improving your website layout and create actual conversions, you definitely need a more professional and reliable usability testing solution.

Lucky for you, now there are a number of professional website usability testing tools that come in every flavor and for every pocket size.

Depending on the specific features you need and the type of tool you are looking for (software or web-based), there is a wide price range of $9/month to $1500 where you can find the ideal usability testing tool for your website.

These professional website usability testing tools work all pretty much in the same way: you just let the tool record the screen of your potential user and highlight for you all the operations that she carries out on your pages. Mouse movements, clicks, form inputs, page scrolling, the whole user experience is recorded on video so that you can watch it at your own pace and take your notes.

To help you you identify and select the most appropriate website usability testing tool for your specific needs, you will find in this guide a set of individual reviews, comparative tables and a comprehensive mindmap of all the usability testing tools available out there to immediately get you started.

Here below are the specific selection criteria that I have used to compare all the usability testing tools I have listed for you inside this guide:

  • Screen recording: Screen capture of testers' computer screens, whether remotely or inside a local network.
  • Screen sharing: Real-time sharing of the computer screen of testers from one or multiple computers.
  • Voice recording: Recording of the microphone input of testers.
  • Webcam recording: Recording of the webcam video stream of testers.
  • Visual maps of user behavior: Visualization on a heat map of the elements in your website design where visitors click or look and which path they follow to carry on specific tasks.
  • Analytics reporting: Report with analytical data that allows you to evaluate the quality of website design and user interface.
  • Usability reporting: Report highlighting key elements in website design that user favor or find difficult to use.
  • Coding required to install: Mandatory HTML or Javascript code snippet to be pasted on your web pages to be able to record users.
  • Free trial: Free testing trial period.
  • Price: Starting price.

However, if you don't feel like spending any money for a usability testing tool, you might want to check the MasterNewMedia guide about free website usability testing tools.

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