The Best UX Research Tools as of November, 2022
All UX research is remote to some degree now. We hope this will be of some help! Tools for doing behavioral user experience, interaction, and usability research. If it’s related to behavior, it’s on here. We’ve assembled this over the years from our own use, one million Slack groups, events, articles, and spreadsheets. None of these companies have paid us for this placement and there are no rankings or ratings here. Everything is sorted price by default. Yell @ethnio or comment to get updated or placed. No guarantees.
# Research Ops Platforms
Panel, Recruiting, Screening, Scheduling ,and Incentive payment. Basically participant management. Also can include intercepts, panel sub-sites, etc.
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethnio | $79/month + | Site or App Intercepts or upload a CSV from your internal or existing lists. | Recruiting questions, your own CSV of participants, or a site or native app. | Create detailed recruiting screeners for your site or app visitors, or send out direct links. Schedule and pay incentives (visa or amazon) and manage all participants. | Intercepts, Participants, Screeners, Money |
| Panelfox | ? | Upload or create screener | Screening questions or your own CSV of participants. | Panel management, bulk email, screeners, scheduling, confirmations, and reminders | Participants |
| Testing Time | 8 Swiss Francs / participant and up | TestingTime handles everything to do with recruiting, from the screener at the beginning to the payment at the end. Thanks to our pool of more than 250,000 test users, we can match your criteria exactly and offer same-day replacements in case of a last-minute cancellation. | Screening criteria | You enter the type of study, the number of participants, and the criteria participants must meet into our online calculator and hit 'order.' We'll send you a link so you can view your test users as they start coming in. | Test users in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, and the UK who match your criteria perfectly, in just 48 hours. |
| User Interviews | $30/Participant and up | Target by profession, geography, demographics, or any criteria you choose. | Screening criteria | Recruit from our community of over 125,000 vetted participants. | Participants |
| Respondent | $21 / Participant or 35% Service Fee and Up | Panel or upload | Screening criteria or participants | Easily source research participants for in-person, remote, or online research studies | Participants |
| Great Question | $49/mo & up | Create an opted in panel of real customers, not paid actors. | Recruiting questions, research goals | Build a panel of customers to interview, survey, or get feedback on a prototype. | Participants, Integrated platform for testing, video files, transcripts, notes and insights |
Automated Testing
You create tasks for participants, they see them in an iframe or window, and then they use a site while the tool gathers analytics about their behavior. You get task completion rates, length of time on tasks, and other analytics.
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optimal Workshop | $199/mo & up | Recruit from our participant panel of 80 million and over 80+ languages. Or recruit your own participants for free! | A link to tasks, instructions, questions and assets to test with your participants | Platform of 5 tools together | Dashboard of results to filter and share with key stakeholders and decision makers. Detailed path analysis (pie tree), heat maps, click density grids comprehensive visualizations to support your design changes. |
| UXtweak | €98/mo | Recruit respondents by sending a link or using a built-in recruitment widget that can be added to any website and turn website visitors into study participants. | Screening Questionnaire, Pre and post-study questionnaire, Built-in reward feature, Recruitment Widget | Create your online study with tasks and questionnaires, Share your study link to your audience, or get testers from your own site, Collect qualitative and quantitative data and analyze user behavior | Click, Scroll and Move Heatmaps, Users suggestion and feedback collection, Think-aloud protocol, Activity Tracking, Session Recording |
| UsabilityHub | $199/month or $1/min & up | Recruit from our demographically diverse panel or bring your own participants for free. | The tasks, questions, and assets you wish to test. | Upload designs and compose your study out of various methodologies, including first click tests, five second tests, preference tests, and surveys. | Interactive dashboard of results you can filter and share, including time on task, heat maps, word clouds and text tagging. |
| Userlytics | $49/user and up | Recruit your own or use our international panel (many advanced filtering/screening capabilities) | The tasks/instructions/questions for participants (and participant profile if using our panel) | 1. Create tasks/instructions (or have our UX consultants) 2. Set participant profile 3. Launch test 4. Analyze results (or have our UX consultants) | Full video interactions (screen, webcam and audio), user feedback, metrics (ratios, success/failure, SUS, NPS, SEQ, and more) audio transcriptions, and highlight reels. Additional: Test script design and in depth reports |
| Checkealos | 250€ for 5 participants & up | Choose the wanted customer profiles from various English and Spanish audience in UK, USA, Spain and Latin America. or set up your own end-users | A URL to your service or app and list of tasks for feedback | The participant's screen interaction and voice are recorded as they "think out loud" completing set tasks | Full interaction videos, issue highlight clips, prioritised UX analysis report with recommendations |
| UserZoom | $3k/mo & up | Recruit from a UserZoom partner panel or your own, Intercept visitors from your site, or send a link to people on your own mailing list | Tasks and instructions for participants | 1. Create an online study with their application 2. Send invitations to participants 3. Analyze results on the dashboard they providee | Effectiveness & Efficiency Ratios, Visual clickstream paths, Click heatmaps, Popular words (text clouds), Users' suggestions & feedback, Satisfaction & perception indicators, Cluster analysis & dendograms |
| Loop11 | $69/month & up | Navigation tasks | You create a remote usability test... "Create tasks and questions to help you explore the user experience, determine satisfaction and validate task completion on any website." Invite participants then analyze the data. | A report featuring: task completion rate, time per task, most common success page, most common fail page, most common first click, most common navigation path, detailed participant path analysis, and number of page views to complete tasks. | |
| Usabilla (acquired by SurveyMonkey) | $49/mo to $199/mo | Static images or URLs | """1) Create Test: Create a new experiment. 2) Select Pages: Select the pages or images to test. 3) Add Tasks: Add basic questions or tasks. 4) Invite Subjects: Invite your users to share their opinion. 5) Browse Results: Use your users' input to improve. "" | Pretty cool heatmaps |
Education
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bellini Slushie Question Bank | Forever free | N/A | If you'd like to submit questions to the bank / translations / local responses, you can add them to the question bank. | Open-source database of survey questions, translations, and guidance. The questions come with recommendations on use, examples, and how-to-use guides. | Use the Question Bank as inspiration or reference as you write your survey and interview questions. |
| Apple & Banana | Free | N/A | Interest in UX Research | Visit the awesome site | Research articles |
Moderated Testing
These allow you to observe a participant directly and talk to them at the same time.
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| methinks | $89/participant and up | Use methinks "Thinker" panel or bring your own participants | A mobile web, mobile app in dev or store (iOS and Android) or desktop web or app. No coding or development work needed. | Real time moderated app or web usability testing using built in video chat. With the screen share facility, researchers can see how the users engage with their web or app. Video call and screens are recorded automatically and saved in the cloud. Machine transcription, video editing/cliping features are provided in dashboard. | Cloud recordings, Transcription, Editable/sharable highlight reel |
| PingPong | €75 per 30 mins session | Use PingPong global panel or your own users. Demographic filtering and screening options. | User researcher who'll conduct the research and moderate the session | You create a new research, set date & time, demographics and screening. PingPong is fully automated, so you'll get people booking sessions right into your calendar. You can run user interviews with people from almost any country, within hours. | Recordings, Transcriptions, Sharable Videos |
| Lookback | $199/yr & up | You provide your own | An iOS or Android or Web App | Pretty slick live sharing and recording of camera & screen for native apps or desktop. | Videoz |
| Zoom, Obvs | $14/.99 / mo and up | A participant with a screen to share | The most popular screen-sharing everrrrrr | Recordings and auto-transcription (beta) for cloud recordings | |
| Dscout | $15,000/project & up | Mobile phone tasks | They have an iOS app, Dscout, that participants download. You create tasks ("missions") and your participants are asked to take a photo or screenshot of their app usage and comment. | Pretty cool charts and graphs of everyone's mobile submissions. |
Our Picks
This represents our workflow and the tools we use right now. Full disclosure, we're Ethnio, but if you read this much italicized text, you're already mad at us.
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethnio | $79/month + | Site or App Intercepts or upload a CSV from your internal or existing lists. | Recruiting questions, your own CSV of participants, or a site or native app. | Create detailed recruiting screeners for your site or app visitors, or send out direct links. Schedule and pay incentives (visa or amazon) and manage all participants. | Intercepts, Participants, Screeners, Money |
| Lookback | $199/yr & up | You provide your own | An iOS or Android or Web App | Pretty slick live sharing and recording of camera & screen for native apps or desktop. | Videoz |
| Dscout | $15,000/project & up | Mobile phone tasks | They have an iOS app, Dscout, that participants download. You create tasks ("missions") and your participants are asked to take a photo or screenshot of their app usage and comment. | Pretty cool charts and graphs of everyone's mobile submissions. |
Research Repositories
Newer category of planning, organizing, analyzing, and sharing insights within your organization
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consider.ly | 19€/mo & up | Bring your own | Qualitative data from interviews, surveys, reports, and more. Text, video, audio, and all other files at a central place. | UX research repository for collaborative analysis of qualitative data, discovering themes and spotting patterns through interactive visualizations, sharing insights and findings, and building a searchable body of research knowledge. | Findings as "insights" with traces to the raw data, tagged user quotes, visualizations (tag correlation, word clouds, etc.) for reports. |
| Condens | $40/mo & up | Bring your own | Recordings from interviews, user tests or usability studies, notes and any files. | Get automatic transcripts or take notes, analyze data with tags and affinity-style clusters while collaborating in real-time. Share results via the browser and build a research repository. | Shareable, evidence-based summary of key findings of a research project and a searchable research repository. |
| Aurelius | $44/mo & up | BYOP :-) | User research notes, customer feedback, qualitative survey responses, etc. | Rapidly add, tag, organize, search and make sense of all your user research notes and feedback to find patterns and create key insights to make better design/product/feature decisions | Key Insights (or "research nuggets") tagged and organized with supporting notes and documents all in one place; tagged research notes, raw data, documents and key insights across ALL research projects in one place |
| Dovetail | $100/mo & up | Provide your own | Qualitative data to analyze (e.g. survey responses, testing notes, interview transcripts, NPS feedback) | Organize user research data, identify patterns using simple inline tagging, and collaborate on analysis. Useful for survey responses, interviews, user testing notes, and remote synthesis sessions. | Tagged user quotes and insights |
| Great Question | $49/mo & up | Create an opted in panel of real customers, not paid actors. | Recruiting questions, research goals | Build a panel of customers to interview, survey, or get feedback on a prototype. | Participants, Integrated platform for testing, video files, transcripts, notes and insights |
Self-Moderated Testing
Your participant speaks into their mic, and completes tasks they read on screen, giving you a video of their interactions.
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teston | € 60 / user video | Teston will recruit testers for you based on your target audience or demographic criteria. You can recruit your own testers if preferred. | A URL and a list of tasks or question | Your custom group of testers will follow your instructions to complete a set of tasks and answer questions. You will receive a video (5 or 20 minutes) with a recording of the tester plus screencast. | Full interaction videos with audio, collaborative commenting on videos, results within hours of test publication, free replacement for unsatisfactory tests, and free test templates |
| PlaybookUX | $49/participant | Use their international panel or bring your own participants | Links and questions for participants | 1. Recruit your target audience 2. Create questions (or have their consultants do it) 3. Launch the test 4. Receive videos / deliverables within hours | Videos, A.I. insights report including task completion / SUS / NPS / SEQ, transcript, note-taking, tags and highlight clips |
| Userlytics | $49/user and up | Recruit your own or use our international panel (many advanced filtering/screening capabilities) | The tasks/instructions/questions for participants (and participant profile if using our panel) | 1. Create tasks/instructions (or have our UX consultants) 2. Set participant profile 3. Launch test 4. Analyze results (or have our UX consultants) | Full video interactions (screen, webcam and audio), user feedback, metrics (ratios, success/failure, SUS, NPS, SEQ, and more) audio transcriptions, and highlight reels. Additional: Test script design and in depth reports |
| User Insights | $10-$15 per test | Use testers for our panel, sort by skill level in various areas, basic demographics or technology options. | Tasks and instructions on what should be tested. | Testers follow a series of instructions to complete goals, give feedback and accomplish tasks. They return a 5 minute (or longer) video of the results. | 5+ Minute videos with full interaction, narrated audio feedback. |
| UserBob | $1/user and up | Users are provided that match some basic demographic criteria. | Tasks and a website or mobile app to test | Affordable remote user testing service for apps and websites | Narrated screencast videos of users using your website or app |
| Checkealos | 250€ for 5 participants & up | Choose the wanted customer profiles from various English and Spanish audience in UK, USA, Spain and Latin America. or set up your own end-users | A URL to your service or app and list of tasks for feedback | The participant's screen interaction and voice are recorded as they "think out loud" completing set tasks | Full interaction videos, issue highlight clips, prioritised UX analysis report with recommendations |
| UserFeel | $49 Per User | Use testers from our panel (choose testers from 40 different native languages and multiple demographics) or your own users | Tasks, site to test, etc | Similar to other self-moderated tools | Video, Comments, Answers to after-test questions, SUS, report |
| Userbrain | $35 - $150/mo | Task(s) and instructions for your website or prototype | Setup your task and add the URL you want to observe. Someone from their participant pool or an "expert" will review the task. Both audio and screen recordings from each user session will be sent to your email inbox at the frequency that matches your plan (1, 3, or 5x per week) | A video recording of the unmoderated test, every Monday, every other day, or daily depending on the plan you choose | |
| UsersThink | $49 | They use a panel of crowd-sourced users - not sure how they are getting the people. | A URL to test | They have 12 people look at the single URL, then send you a PDF of what they said | A PDF report |
| Usertesting.com | $99 per user & up | User their panel or intercept your own users with Ethnioo | Tasks and instructions for participants | They record the participant's screen and voice as they "think out loud" while they use your site. | Videos and comments |
Surveys
We really try and focus on behavioral tools instead of self-reported, but there are just a few that we use and we wanted to include. Because, face it, we all have to do surveys or analytics sometimes.
| Tool | Price | Participant Options | You Provide | How it Works | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qualtrics (acquired by SAP then spun out again wow) | If you have to ask | Surveys | Surveys | Surveys | Surveys |
| Typeform | Free or $40 / mo | None | Questions | An alternative to surveymonkey | Gorgeous surveys and reports |