10 Best Usability Testing Tools for Apps, Websites, and Services

Are you working hard to analyze app, website, and SaaS user friendliness to provide the best UX to your customers and clients? Try these usability testing tools right now!

Ensuring a seamless user experience (UX) is essential for the success of any mobile app, web app, website, or SaaS service. Undoubtedly, applications and website interfaces will pose some challenges to the end user. Here, usability testing helps you to rectify such bottlenecks in UX.

If you are not sure how to pick the best usability software, you have come to the right place. This ultimate article on usability testing systems will help you choose the cream of the crop so that you can easily evaluate the user-friendliness of your digital products. 

The tools mentioned in this guide will help anyone and everyone coming from a developer, designer, or business background to refine their digital products and service offerings!

What Is Usability Testing?

Usability testing is a key technical process in user experience (UX) design. The technique focuses on researching how easy to interact with software, website, mobile app, or SaaS service by its target audience.

The research is done at the user-end level. It means the developers, designers, software engineers, and business managers closely monitor how end users navigate through the product or service.

Often, the process involves many focus groups and beta-testing communities to use a minimal viable product or prototype product. These beta testers send data directly to the software developer or IT business through specialized web, mobile, or desktop apps.

Specialist UX researchers, by watching users using the product, uncover user frustrations, bottlenecks, and areas of improvement. The findings go straight into the Agile, Scrum, or DevOps cycle so that iterative refinements can be made. 

Ultimately, the usability testing practice ensures that your digital product is exactly as the user wants and sells well than your competitors.

What Is a Usability Testing Tool?

A usability testing tool is an application that tests the user-friendliness of a product. It also predicts how effortless the user interface is for the end users. Usability testing software is often a cloud app and lets UX researchers collaborate and work remotely with developers, DevOps managers, and end users.

UX researchers also create and conduct usability evaluations with users. Furthermore, the tool provides all functionalities and data analytics to analyze the success rate of the ongoing project.

Find below the standard features and functionalities of a usability testing system:

• Task scenarios
• User interaction recording and playback
• Heatmaps
• Surveys, comments, and feedback
• Data analytics and visualization

Therefore, the software becomes a powerful tool for UX designers and researchers to understand the preferences of the audience. These tools also help mobile app and website developers explore usability issues to refine the overall experience around the product.

Finally, a usability testing tool ensures that the end user will ultimately have no complaints against the UX after iterative refinement of the product. 

How to Pick the Right Usability Testing Tool

• Find out if the usability testing system suits mobile apps, websites, web apps, SaaS services, or all the mentioned products.
• Ensure that the tool will allow you to reach your audience on a wide range of platforms and channels.
• Don’t forget to match the usability testing types offered. For example, whether the tool offers only remote, moderated, unmoderated, etc., testing methods, or all of these.
• Check the usability testing budget of your DevOps project and compare the subscription plans of multiple apps before buying one.
• Your software or website and its UX design are highly confidential. Find out if the tool you buy offers encryption at all modes of data handling.
• Choose a usability testing software that offers seamless collaboration with role-based access to onboard internal and external collaborators. 
• It must allow integration with DevOps tools, platform engineering tools, and so on.
• Not to mention, the tool should offer an easy way for recruitment and participation management. 

Now that you know the important considerations for choosing the appropriate UX testing tool, find below a few hand-picked names used by the most successful software developers:    

Maze

Maze helps you to drive continuous product improvement. It facilitates this feat by enabling you to collect customer or user insights faster and analyze data for decision-making. Maze comes with all the functionalities you need in a usability testing tool like the following:

• Research
• Recruit
• Analyze

In the Research section, you will find all the UX testing methods you might need for your project, like prototype testing, live website testing, feedback surveys, interview studies, cord sorting, and tree testing.

If you need to enlist a few customers or users for custom UX research, you can use the Recruit section of Maze. Recruit lets you assemble a focus group or test participants from a pre-enlisted pool or panel. Also, the Recruit section has the necessary integration support so that you can send in-app or in-product prompts.     

Hotjar Engage

Hotjar Engage helps you to find an appropriate set of users for your apps, websites, or SaaS products. Also, it is one of the largest UX testing pool marketplaces containing testers from around the globe. 

Therefore, if you are developing a financial services web app from the USA but want to target the UK market, too, you go to Hotjar Engage to seek interested users for app testing from the UK.

Here are its notable features:

• Visualize user behavior using heatmaps
• Watch users clicking, moving the mouse cursor, u-turns, and more with user session replay
• Context-driven feedback prompts and forms   
• Voice-of-customer surveys
• Host moderated user reviews

Besides being a vast marketplace of testing recruits, it offers all the standard functionalities needed in your product UX research and development project.

Lookback

Used by IT giants like Netflix, Spotify, Google, etc., for the usability testing of their products, Lookback is the must-have UX research tool for any app and website development project.

Like other usability testing software, it offers all the tools, functionalities, and features needed for app and website testing. Find below a list of major capabilities:

• Moderated usability testing
• Unmoderated UX testing
• Secured video conference with participants
• Timestamped notes, shared insights, team chat, etc.
• Project boards
• Participant management

The most important attraction of Lookback is Eureka, your UX research assistant powered by AI and ML. It can seamlessly capture candid feedback, quotes, and context when interviewing hundreds of participants.

Lookback is also a state-of-the-art AI-powered qualitative UX research tool. It can analyze video and text chats and create summaries with data-driven decisions.         

UserZoom GO

UserZoom GO is a UX research platform from the UserTesting brand. You can drive business growth by creating user experiences that delight customers using UserZoom GO. You can do so by utilizing the advanced tools offered by this powerful usability testing platform.

It is an all-in-one UX research platform that caters to all the functionalities, from designing a study to sharing improvement insights with the stakeholders. Between these, it covers recruiting the target audience for product testing, launching, and scheduling UX research studies. 

Moreover, UserZoom Go helps you extract actionable insights from audience studies with synced playback, auto-generated charts, automated transcripts, heatmaps, and more.      

Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop includes various UX testing tools to fast-track your research workflow. Its specialized tool list includes tree testing, card sorting, end-user surveys, user interviews, and first-click testing. As you get all the necessary tools for qualitative UX research in one place, you can progress quickly with the data collection phase.

Besides the usability research tools, Optimal Workshop offers an organized, streamlined, and easy-to-use platform for participant recruiting. It has a pool of participants consisting of more than 50 million participants. The users come from a variety of backgrounds, countries, and demographics.

Therefore, the Optimal Workshop’s participant pool is perfect for you to source testers of products for local and global ventures. Also, the pool has a mix of participants who speak 80 different languages. Thus, if your research is language-driven, you shall get the response you need.       

Userbrain

Userbrain usability testing tool empowers you to become a usability testing champion from a novice in just a few minutes. One of its best attractions is access to many proven usability testing case studies. You can use these as examples or templates to research the best UX design or improve an existing product of a similar kind.

The Userbrain app interface organizes the examples thoughtfully so that you can quickly find what you need. You can also filter the templates by setting filters like Categories (SaaS, eCommerce, Ticket Booking, etc.), Tasks (compare Products, Get in Contact, Search a Product, etc.), Types (Web App, Websites, etc.), and Devices (Phone, Tablet, and Desktop).

To try out the usability testing software, you can sign up for a free trial, choose a pre-configured template, and start collecting data thereafter.

When you get the paid plan and need participants for UX research, you can recruit a diverse range of testers from a 100k+ pool of users. If required, you can onboard third-party users for UX research by screening yourself.

Userbrain’s Automated Insights feature helps you to produce data-driven insights from your UX research project in a few minutes. If you need to present your findings to business stakeholders or a client, you can use its pre-configured report templates.       

Loop11

With the Loop11 usability testing tool, it only takes 4 simple steps to test the usability of your design and gather insights so that you can make better design decisions throughout the product development lifecycle.

You can create a usability test on this platform in just 30 minutes and see how the users respond to your design. A panel of verified users is also available on this platform; else, you can bring your participants to use this solution at no additional cost.

Here, recording of screen, audio, and video of the participants is available for checking their first-hand experience. Loop11 provides useful statistics and metrics that you can interpret for data-driven decisions or share with the participants.

UsabilityHub

When it comes to product design, the first impression of the users speaks a lot about it. On UsabilityHub, you can measure the first impression of your customers and optimize your product design.

It also helps you understand the information users take away within the first five seconds of looking at the design. Thus, you will know if your website design is able to effectively communicate the intended message to the audience.

Using word cloud visualization, UsabilityHub also enables you to spot trends. This platform also supports other usability tests, such as design surveys, click tests, and navigation tests.

PlaybookUX

PlaybookUX is a comprehensive user feedback platform for creating a central repository of customer insights. You can use it for recruiting, conducting, and analyzing qualitative and quantitative research.

Using the PlaybookUX panel, you can identify and target your audience or use your customer base for usability testing. Then, you can choose from unmoderated, moderated, card sorting, tree testing, and surveys to run qualitative or quantitative research.

It also comes with powerful analysis features to get the results from gathered insights. Above all, PlaybookUX allows you to build a central research repository that can be searched and organized easily.

UXtweak

It does not matter whether you are at the prototyping stage or production, UXtweak provides you with all the tools necessary for enhancing the usability of your products. Using this software, you can recruit participants for usability testing. It also lets you analyze user activity to organize website content in a way that is easy to navigate. 

For usability testing, this software assists you in performing first-click tests, website testing, mobile testing, and prototype testing. When it comes to understanding the activities of your users, this tool lets you record the screen and perform surveys. Also, there are five-second tests and performance tests to learn about user requirements.

Final Words

The user-centric design of the UI and UX is of paramount importance to increase your product’s engagement and sales. Check out the best usability testing tools mentioned above in this article. After evaluating the applications, choose one or more that fits your DevOps projects.

Looking to create user-friendly blueprints for your apps or SaaS products? Check out these best wireframe tools right now!