There is some kind of huge development craze going on in the remote / online usability tools market. My guess is that usertesting.com has inspired some of this, along with the perceived market for interface research. Here are the new tools that have launched within the last month or two. If we are missing any drop a line!:

• Userlytics. Another recording tool that records users’ facial expressions and audio comments as well as logging their webcam video (!) and screen movements on the website, according to a text script that you give participants. Then you watch flash videos of their experience and read summaries. Free trial, $299 per 5 testers and $47 for each additional tester.

• Trymyui. Very similar to usertesting.com and userlytics  – they find users for you, rate them, and make sure they are good at recording their own thoughts while they user your site or prototype.  Free trial and then $25 per user.

• IntuitionHQ. Very similar to Usabilla, you can create tasks and record where people click on a static images. The difference is that IntuitionHQ automatically creates static images of your live site, hence making it seem like people are interacting with a live site. They are not. But that’s cool, we actually really like these kind of tools for creating cool heatmaps of where people click on static images. $9 per test with unlimited users.

• Plainframe. This is the first UX tool I’ve heard of that let’s you create an interactive IA and site structure for users to interact with and track their behavior. You quickly put your navigation structure into a clickable “white site.”¹ They record the interactions as data for analysis, and let you play them back so you can see how the user interacts with the site dynamically. In Closed Beta as of May, 2010.