Another option is to collect a group of your friends, family, and various non-technical users and just give them a few tasks to do on your website. If the site is usable then most people in the group will be able to complete the tasks.
As a technical user, I'm finding that some users struggle with the most basic things on the web so you should always base your usability tests on your target market. (seems obvious but frequently forgotten)
I've just recently gotten into using usertesting.com to get quick feedback on the usability of my product. It's extremely valuable to get an idea of how other users are interacting with software, and helps guide where we need to make improvements.
As the article mentions, it also helps our team to get on the same page. If left to ourselves we'd debate for a long time on how certain things should work. Once we see the user testing videos it's painfully obvious what needs to be done, and then we all get to work making it better. Down at the bottom there's some good tips for usertesting I'm looking forward to giving a try
Thanks for the helpful feedback. I keep hearing positive things about usertesting.com and today our team decided that we're definitely going to incorporate it into our testing plan.
However, easyusability.com has a much more powerful call to action and seems to be a newer competitor to usertesting.com. I'm excited to try both.
100% on having the whole team see the videos live. Makes the necessary changes obvious to everyone without getting egos involved.
As a technical user, I'm finding that some users struggle with the most basic things on the web so you should always base your usability tests on your target market. (seems obvious but frequently forgotten)