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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:
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.
Do top US corporations use social media? Is the business world leveraging new media technologies to engage customers? The answer is definitely positive according to a new research study on 2009 Fortune 500 companies and their use of social media tools, like blogs and Twitter and authored by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson.
Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh and Dmitriy Shironosov
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Website usability testing identifies a precise methodology devoted to uncover specific bugs, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the way that website design impacts the effective use, legibility, navigation, and user experience of your website. In this MasterNewMedia guide you can find the best free website usability testing tools available out there.
Heat map of MasterNewMedia homepage created with Feng-GUI
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Photo credit: Kheng Guan Toh
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This 
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Online ad pricing and advertising trends for 2009 showed an encouraging recovery from the economic downturn that hit publishers in 2008. Throughout 2009 ad pricing had been steadily growing till reaching the top in December 2009, where ad prices were even higher than pre-recession.
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The PubMatic Ad Price Index 2009 states a 111% increase from the last quarter of 2008 to the last months of 2009. But which 
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Photo credit: Taketorise Computer
Usability and design should always be major concerns when you decide to post or share content on the web. But what if you 
Communicating via email in a direct, intimate and informal way remains one of the best ways to market and promote your content, services and products online. This is why the most effective online businesses still rely on crafting quality newsletters and email updates to keep their fans and customers updated, entertained and happy. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best free email newsletter distribution and mailing services available 
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Content media expert, and Content Nation author John Blossom, analyzes AP recent moves and where 
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Photo credit Tecnologia Pyme.
Academics have long operated within a system of peer reviewed scholarship. The research process is seen as incomplete until a group of anonymous experts has commented on and approved a paper prepared according to specific criteria. Only then can the work
Last updated - 16:26 Rome Darren Rowse looks at some options available to bloggers who have decided to end their blog but who don’t quite know how to do it.
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While many of us in the marketing world tend to focus on how many followers we have and how to get more, for many Twitter users the other side of that coin is a real challenge: How do I find good people to follow on Twitter?
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TV consumption is going to explode in growth over the next several years thanks to online and mobile video. That's the conclusion of Jeff Cole, director of USC's Center for the Digital Future, who studies media habits of consumers all around the ...
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During his keynote at SXSW this afternoon (live blog here), Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced a new "At Anywhere" platform, which allows websites to more deeply integrate the service into their sites. The idea is to offer a more seamless ...
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Netsukuku is a p2p based new routing protocol that could - for the purpose of linking users’ computers in a p2p cloud - replace the IP numbers-based addressing and routing that is the system currently in use to link servers to users in the internet.
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A commission in the UK called “The Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society” has suggested a tax on Google (and presumably others in Google’s position) as one way to support local news media.
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