Technology has brought about new, exciting, cheap and free remote usability testing tools that can tackle every usability research job. Through use of these tools, usability researchers spend just fraction of cost to obtain standard result that traditionally could be very costly.
Remote Usability Testing Tools
It is designed to gather input and feedback from customer about marketing, re-branding and reorganizing well. This tool can be used by site usability researchers in gathering information about website interfaces and designs in store. In this case you depend mostly on reviewer’s feedback and quality score given by each.
This tool tracks where users click as well as providing display method of results through heat heatmaps. The tool is a free OpenSource tool that can be deployed on web servers. ClickHeat tracks real users who are trying to conduct real tasks on your website.
This is a tool which you can use to recruit and find site users for live remote test. Some JavaScript codes are added to page you are thinking of recruiting users. Web site visitors are directed participate in usability test and each time you get alerted in case of an active candidate and thus use GoToMeeting to connect to them.
Usability tool that allows researchers upload images and viewers give feedback about it. The viewing only last for five second and this determines whether users shall stay on the site or leave it. There are two versions of five seconds provided to the user. First is visual demonstration and the other is a onetime click test. Users list five things giving reasons as to why they clicked the image.
Google Website Optimizers
This is a free Multivariate testing tool enabling usability testing of “what if” scenarios. The tool is simple and experiment setting up is easy to carry out. The experiment allows two different version of website page run together simultaneously. An HTML code is added to the web page and traffic to the page is split into 50-50 between the two pages.
Pencil and Paper
Using these two tools to conduct usability testing can be extremely effective and fast. This can be done by drawing wireframes, interfaces and hosting other usability mechanisms. These are among the available tools which are cheap, simple to use and communicate quite effectively.
One of the popular click tracking usability tool which allows displaying of large number of interesting data base clicks. The display includes heatmaps of popular location clicks on the page, lists and overlays. The reporting tool captures location of clicks on the page, referrer information, operating system and other essential related information. The data can be downloaded and be used in Excel or databases.
Conclusion
Given the fact that these remote usability testing tools are absolutely free some people have taken this chance to use them frequently.
