Usability Testing with Userfly

Design, pretty graphics and lots of the latest javascript tricks are fine, but maybe the most important thing about your website is this magical term, usability. Can the people coming to your site find what they need to find easily and quickly?

It’s a tough question to answer, and often it can be hard to track, discover and hopefully improve. You’ve got focus groups, user studies, surveys and so on. In my mind, nothing beats watching people try to use the site.

There are a few services online that will do that, including CrazyEgg, Clicktale and TeaLeaf. Now there’s a new site to help you track user activity.

Enter Userfly. It’s a new online tool that allows you to watch users interact with your site. They accomplish this with one line of javascript that follows where your users are mousing, clicking, and so on. You track these sessions and you can go back at a later time and playback in real-time what the user was doing.

Here’s a video overview.

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

It looks like a great tool, and right now it’s free to try, and they’ll track 10 users an hour. They have a pro plan with allows for unlimited users, but they haven’t figured out a pricing structure yet. From their website:

We are still trying to figure out our pricing structure, but we will most likely charge per user, and let you set a cap on the amount you’d like to pay. Once your cap is hit, we stop capturing users, and you can buy more captures at any time.

Sounds like a tool definitely worth checking out.

Update: They’re experiencing heavy loads after being featured on a few sites like Read Write Web today, so they’re getting a bit hammered. Maybe give this one a few days to try out.