12 Tools for Effectively User Testing Your Website

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What is your favorite tool for user testing your company website and why?

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Parasoft

Tools to make testing more efficient. Parasoft’s software testing solutions automate time-consuming testing tasks across development and QA, bringing the results together in an interactive reporting and analytics platform for actionable team and stakeholder insights. You can reduce the time, effort, and cost of delivering safe, secure, high-quality software to the market by leveraging automation testing from Parasoft.

 

2. FullStory 

michael-mogillFullStory is a great tool; it’s like a DVR for your website. For both desktop and mobile, you can see how people navigate your site, what they do, what they click on, how they scroll and more. It’s a tool that can give you great feedback from a user testing standpoint.

– Michael MogillCrisp Video Group

3. join.me

join.me isn’t a user-testing service, but it can be used to facilitate the best user tests. It’s a screen-sharing tool that allows the person on the other end to control your screen without needing to install any software. Why is it the best? Rather than connecting with strangers for user testing, you can use join.me to connect with your actual users wherever they are and get real feedback.

– Bhavin Parikh, Magoosh Inc

4. InVision 

kristopher-jones-1At LSEO and APPEK Mobile Apps, we use InVision for user testing. InVision makes it incredibly efficient to get user feedback in real time by providing a working copy of the website to a customer (or team member) to review. As the customer interacts with the site, she is able to provide feedback by simply clicking on a designated element and commenting. InVision is free for small businesses.

– Kristopher JonesLSEO.com

5. Inspectlet ruben-gamez

One of the most insightful things we do is watch real users use our website. We do this by using Inspectlet, which records user sessions and lets you play them back. With Inspectlet, we’re not asking users to do things. We’re just watching real users going about their normal activities. It’s tough to get this type of instant feedback from other tools.

– Ruben GamezBidsketch

6. heatmap 

jared-brownheatmap show us the “hot spots” of a website. The top of the page is typically “red” since most people see it first when they visit. Since less people scroll down afterwards, the page gets “cooler” as it goes. Using heatmap shows us whether our information architecture makes sense and if our visitors are looking for certain info in different places, and helps us refine navigation.

– Jared Brown, Hubstaff

7. Crazy Egg 

marcela-devivoUsing heat mapping, we can get a better idea of what users actually look at, how they navigate the page and what parts of the page they are clicking on. Crazy Egg is an industry leader in user testing, and we’ve found that it gives the most accurate and reliable data. The pricing packages are attractive and the features are powerful in distinguishing between clicks, scrolling, etc.

– Marcela De Vivo, Brilliance

8. Google Testing 

dalip-jaggiGoogle provides an online tool that will generate a report in seconds on how your website works across mobile and desktop devices. It’s easy to understand, providing a mobile-friendliness score, analyzing website speeds and contributing optimization tips to challenge your developer for improvements. Satisfying Google requirements will increase your website value!

– Dalip Jaggi, Devise Interactive

9. Google Analytics mark-daoust

Although it might be a bit of a generic tool, I still mine Analytics to see how users are interacting and converting on my website. With all of the data in one place, it offers a nice, easy set of data that I can parse in multiple ways to learn where potential problems exist on my sites.

– Mark Daoust, Quiet Light Brokerage, Inc.

10. Optimizely 

guillermo-ortizOur favorite tool for testing UX on our websites is Optimizely, an A/B split testing tool that allows you to change elements of a website and test one version against another. By using A/B testing, we can improve metrics like time on site, conversion rate and engagement. The data we get through Optimizely allows us to fine tune our websites to get more from the existing traffic.

– Guillermo OrtizGeek Powered Studios

11. BugHerd peter-boyd

We love BugHerd. It allows everyone to review the website in real time and post their comments. Moreover, we can organize the comments based on their priority level. Our developers can then work on the code, QA can approve and we can mark the issues as resolved. It’s so easy to use and just keeps us organized.

– Peter BoydPaperStreet Web Design

12. UserTesting roger-lee

UserTesting lets you crowdsource usability testing. You’ll get videos of real people using your website, app or prototype so you can see how they try to navigate it and where they get stuck. The testers talk aloud as they use the product, allowing you to hear what they’re thinking — this is often a source of valuable feedback that would be time-consuming or expensive to get otherwise.

– Roger Lee, Human Interest

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Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and have created tens of thousands of jobs.