User testing is one of the best ways to gather insight on the pains and gains of your site’s user experience. It’s difficult to fully picture how your users interact and react to your site’s features, interface and information until you’ve actually seen them do it in their own natural environment. Unfortunately, unless you can be a fly on every one of your site’s visitors’ wall, gathering this kind of data is next to impossible without investing into expensive usability tests.
Userfly strives to fill this gap with its new usability testing service Secretary movie : a single line of javascript embedded into your site’s source code will give you access to information you thought you’d only see in your geeky dreams. By embedding the code, Userfly captures every click, scroll and type your visitors make and lets you replay them on your own screen, as if you were indeed a fly on their wall.
Be warned though – while you are able to capture your visitors’ every move, you’re still missing a critical piece in the mix: the user’s thought process. While you watch the silent playbacks, you have no sense of what is happening on the user’s end, which may skew the results. Nonetheless, Userfly provides a window into an area that was previously very difficult to access at an affordable rate (free to try, $0.05 per recorded user).
Head of State trailer Source: Userfly, discovered at Userfly Review (Usability Post)
Just recently a new online usability tool arrived called Loop11 (www.Loop11.com). It still seems to be in private beta at the moment, but you can register to be part of it.
Not sure exactly how it compares to Userfly, but touts itself as being “a web-based user-experience testing tool, allowing companies to conduct remote, unmoderated user testing on any kind of digital interface.”