6 Usability Testing Tools for Optimizing your Site

It’s not a secret that user experience plays a massive role in your audience returning to your website and making conversions. That’s why you shouldn’t just go in guessing what works for them and hoping for the best.

By gathering actionable insights from users, you can remove pain points and make data-informed decisions that will help you remove the unnecessary steps along the way and get that perfect UX we’re all chasing.

Platforms that provide you with resources for usability testing are essential in streamlining the process that will result in an optimized, appealing site. When you’re picking a tool to use in your analysis, it’s important to think about what data is the foundation of your improvements, how you wish to interact with the testers and what the scope of your project is.

There are many usability testing tools out there, with different features, prices and strong points, so let’s go over some of them that may be a great match with your audience and help you with optimization.

PlayBookUX

Regardless of your business size and type, PlayBookUX is a testing solution that offers all-around support in fine-tuning your UX.

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It enables you to examine customer interactions through AI software specialized in picking users that fit your target group. Whether you’re looking for a B2B or B2C audience, testers are filtered based on either employment and demographics or their industry, seniority or similar categories.

This tool also automatically generates transcripts  which makes  testing simpler, as you don’t need to worry about taking notes.

One of the biggest benefits of PlayBookUX is that it enables testing internationally with verified testers from more than 50 countries. They go through a two-step verification process so that  you get the best users. There are also translation services available, as well as transcription between different languages.

This process includes double-checking of testers’ details, providing you with the best, hand-picked users for your testing.

The tool also offers user testing templates for various study types which are easily imported based on your team’s needs. Some of the features that can further streamline your process are user persona drafting guides and customer journey maps.

Package pricing starts at $49 per participant. This includes advanced screening, filtering, automated transcription, unlimited video storage, as well as an unlimited number of team members you can include in the process.

UsabilityHub

This tool acts as a research platform, providing you with features that enable collecting feedback in different ways.

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First, click tests are used to check link effectiveness and the hierarchy of your content. The tool achieves this by measuring how people interact with your designs, capturing their first clicks and checking how long it takes them to complete certain tasks.

It provides you with highlights that enable in-depth analysis, with filters that can help you follow up and find out why some areas attract more attention. There are also some additional functionalities for conducting navigation tests and creating funnel visualizations, which can show the points where users are dropping off.

Design surveys are a second key feature, used to confirm your expectations of a customer's journey through direct questions for the users. As the name implies, this puts the design in focus, while also providing feedback on video and audio with files up to 100MB.

You can also filter previous answers which allows you to explore data in detail. You can create custom tests based on insights you gather, while also taking a look at specific text with tags that make comparing expectations and answers easier.

There is also a Preference test included in the platform. You can use it to measure users’ affinity and sentiments to gather insights on which design and copy combinations work the best.

Finally, Five second tests can help you optimize your website clarity-wise, as it measures the first impressions of your users and provides an opportunity to spot trends.

Pricing spans from free basic tests to $200+ packages that are billed monthly.

Hotjar

Whether you’re a marketer, product designer or a product manager, this behavior analytics platform offers an all-in-one feedback software with various features to make your testing process easier.

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Here are the key tools provided that can help you analyze users’ behavior and identify pain points:

Heatmaps – They allow for behavior comparison between devices to determine if your users reach the CTAs and where their attention trails off.

Recordings – Live playbacks of users interacting with your content, with additional options for filtering and comparing visitors based on custom metrics.

Incoming feedback – Each user can leave live feedback on a page-by-page basis, allowing you to figure out which page you need to improve and in which way.

Surveys – They can be set to appear at any point throughout the user journey, both with custom questions and pre-made suggestions for gathering insights.  

Some of the additional benefits of using the platform include simple sharing and exporting of insights, smart visitor targeting through custom attributes, as well as multi-device support.

Pricing for Hotjar packages starts at $89 per month and it increases based on the number of page views from which you're gathering insights.

TryMyUI

This tool matches you with testers that are volunteers, and takes them through a structured user journey of your website.

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You can choose if you want to use your own pool of candidates or connect with people who mirror your ideal testing audience. 

You can provide a list of tasks for the testing that hits all the aspects of your website you need to check. This covers checkpoints such as pages that they need to visit, CTAs they should click or other specific actions.

Each session is recorded so you can watch the testers navigate through the required tasks and see how they perform in some of the features that TryMyUI offers. This includes heatmaps, keystrokes, testing on mobile, screen capture videos, voice-over commentary with provided feedback, as well as questionnaires about system usability.  

There is also a Collaborative Analysis Suite that allows you to share the findings with your team in a simple way.

The tool can be accessed through three varying packages: 

• Personal – free 
• Team – from $299 per month 
• Enterprise – at $1,000 per month.

Userfeel

Unlike many other tools that are only designed with English-speaking markets in mind, Userfeel stands out with a multilingual testers network, similar to PlayBookUX. You can do studies in 40 languages across different platforms, with around 90,000 users that you filter by custom demographic criteria.

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You’re also equipped with a real-time estimate of available testers, while there are screener questions in place to make sure that the participants recently used your product.

Another important feature is the efficiency – the results of your testing are mostly provided to you within a day, including mouse movement tracking, written responses to specific questions, as well as footage with voice-over commentary of task completion in real-time.

As you sort tests by project, all of your team members can access the videos and annotate them, making it easier to organize the work.

Pricing for Userfeel pricing is based on credits, with a cost of $59 per credit. A single credit gives you access to an hour of unmoderated testing with your users, 20 minutes of unmoderated testing with their testers, as well as some other functionalities.

Optimizely

This platform provides you with the tools for A/B testing and web personalization that’s intuitive and user-friendly. It allows you to try out various versions of your website live without the need to change anything in code.

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Optimizely also has different options for content optimization, with its features being focused on tracking visits and conversions. Some of them include testing between multiple browsers, testing on mobile, geotargeting and various types of user segmentation.

Aside from the Experimentation insights, there are also Personalization insights that can help you predict users’ behavior and indicate the best ways to customize interactions on your website.

Finally, with Digital Experience Platform, Optimizely can create a streamlined user journey with an open platform. This gives you specific advice for each touchpoint that the customer needs to pass, so it could be a good idea to use this as a reference when creating your content.

Their basic plan is free to use and offers various features that you can try out. some additional functionalities are only available in the Enterprise plan that is paid for. Optimizely creates custom-based packages, so it’s better to explore all possibilities before asking for the price.

Exploring your options

This selection shows a fraction of the variety that’s present on the market, but it’s a great way to start your search. The success of your optimization doesn’t rely only on a testing platform, but they can massively impact the process.

Think about all the features that you’ll need, what kind of audience you want to involve in the testing and how your team operates. When you know what type of tool you’re looking for, it’ll be much easier to compare them and pick the one that suits you the most.

With some of the platforms offering a similar experience, it can often come down to which interface suits you the most (that’s the UX talk coming full circle), so don’t hesitate to try out a couple of options before you settle with the final choice.