
UserTesting.com - 15 minute video of a user testing your site for $19 - pchristensen
http://www.usertesting.com/
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staunch
I've used it and it is good. Highly recommended. The videos you get aren't
super great quality but they're useful and the price is right. The only
complaint I have is that I'm a tad jealous I didn't start this site.

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jcl
I wonder if one couldn't put together a software package that Mechanical Turk
participants could use to generate similar (if lower-quality) data?

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run4yourlives
Why?

The main deliverable in user testing is _quality_. It's much better to have 5
detailed pieces of data than 100 that don't say anything at all.

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jcl
A smaller sample means a greater chance that it's not representative. If 10%
of the population is colorblind (or left-handed, etc), you stand a greater-
than-50% chance that a random group of five people won't identify a problem
for this segment.

A larger number of available testers means more fresh eyeballs, hence a better
chance of repeat queries yielding accurate first-impression data.

Feedback from people whose job it is to evaluate websites may not be
representative of the average site visitor. They may be more familiar with
common site layouts or have specific pet peeves.

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iamwil
Probably depends on what you're looking for. When you're just starting out a
site, just a couple users will point out all sorts of user interface
weaknesses that'll keep you busy fixing for a long while.

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sachinag
We've used it in the past, and will in the future - BUT this is not rigorous
usability testing of the sort that you'll get in the lab. They're self-
selected and they don't do well with loosely defined objectives (even though
they tend to be North American native English speakers).

If you have access to a Mac and can recruit your own volunteers (college
campus, etc), I'd recommend getting Silverback - <http://silverbackapp.com/> .
Not only do you get the screen capture, you also get to see
frustration/delight on users' faces. Plus, it's cheaper if you plan on doing
four or more tests.

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bprater
I was curious how much the reviewers got. A little digging reveals that they
get $10 per review.

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picnichouse
I've used it - really helpful. Wish they would send their testers eye tracking
monitors - that would rock.

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robg
Agreed, but do they not show the cursor?

Also, do they have a "more users, fewer minutes" option? I know I'd rather
have 15 users for one minute each, or seven for two minutes each. After that,
most users will have decided to stay or flee any ways. It would be good to get
a sense of that early decision-making, especially across a statistically-
reliable sample.

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kevintwohy
Tried it out -- shows the user's cursor fine in my experience.

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robg
Cool. They could just give their testers instructions to use the cursor as a
pointer to where they're looking. Or you could put that in your instructions
to them. It's a decent enough proxy for eye movements any ways.

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laut
Have you seen footage from an eye tracking session? A user can't explain or
point his mouse to where he is looking. The eyes move quickly and somewhat
unconsciously.

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plaggypig
Can anybody share a video session that they themselves commissioned? I'd like
to see how the quality of feedback compares with the "official" demo of
tripadvisor.

P.S. Somebody else mentioned eye tracking - I think commercial solutions for
this are pretty expensive, but I've seen a few hobbyists roll their own using
low cost webcams, though I'm not sure how they fair in terms of accuracy.

P.P.S. And somebody else mentioned just embedding a screen grabber directly
onto your website - I'm sure it's achievable but with a browser extension,
i.e. Mozilla. I'll have a play around and see what I can come up with.

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bemmu
It's possible from Javascript without extensions. I did a prototype of this,
and while streaming the mouse x&y coords to a server was trivial, the hard
part was making sure that what the user is seeing is the same layout I'm
seeing myself.

For example if the user has a larger font size, then the layout might be
different, so those coordinates would not mean what I think they mean. Faced
with this I abandoned my own project on this, but I noticed that sites like
<http://robotreplay.com/> have appeared, not sure how they dealt with that
issue.

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davidw
"Don't Make Me Think" ( [http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/9/dont-make-
me-think-...](http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/9/dont-make-me-think-a-
common-sense-approach-to-web-usability-2nd-edition) ) has a good section on
cheap usability testing.

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run4yourlives
I really like this idea, and I'll probably use this for my own site currently
in development.

Have you considered selling an embeddable recorder that people can use right
on their site? Why or why not? i.e. I pay you $xx for a google analytics style
plugin that I can embed and have any user that wants to provide feedback...

Just trying to understand why you chose to implement as it currently stands.

Once again, really nice.

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ericb
It's a cool idea. I'm not sure that selling mainly on price is a good move
business-wise, though.

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Prrometheus
There would probably be demand for a more expensive, higher-quality service.
Someone else in this thread mentioned adding eye tracking. It also might be
useful to add multiple trials from random individuals and create some sort of
aggregate statistics. These are both things that you could charge a large
premium for.

What is cool about this site from a business perspective is that it is a low-
capital, low-cost way to do things with just one person, much like
girlinyourshirt.com

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simplegeek
It's a cool idea, but I will be reluctant to use it. Sole reason being, the
method they select personnas to do usability testing isn't transparent and I'm
not sure how much useful feedback will be from those personnas.

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cabalamat
I like the idea. I'll probably use it at some point.

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jasonlbaptiste
How do you guys think they find testers? It's specific to demographic and
such, so i think it's beyond mechanical turk?

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wesley
I love it, will definitely use this.

But please add an affiliate program.

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ckinnan
They offer a white label program:

Can our usability firm get a white label version of your service?

Yes, you can resell it to your clients with your logo (not UserTesting.com) so
you can use your brand and set your pricing. Email us at
resellerusertesting.com and we'll get you started.

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nazgulnarsil
I'll do this for $10. :p

