user research remote

Remote User Research: What You Need to Know & Top Tools to Use

Remote user research has emerged as a game-changing approach, letting you peek into the user experience without the limitations of location.

But, what is remote user research , and why should you care? How do you get started, and what tools are out there to make your life easier? 

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the basics of remote user research and discuss some of the most commonly used tools and methods. 

What is remote user research?

Remote user research refers simply to user research done at a distance.

This means the researcher and the participant are not physically in the same location. Instead, they connect using digital tools, including video recordings, virtual products, or online surveys .

Remote user research has gained significant popularity due to its convenience and the ability to access a diverse and global participant pool, regardless of geographic constraints.

It's particularly useful when in-person research is not feasible, for instance in situations of global pandemics, or when the target users are spread across different locations.

Moderated vs. unmoderated remote user research

There are two primary types of remote user research: moderated and unmoderated.

In moderated remote research , a researcher and a participant meet virtually in real-time. 

The researcher guides the participant through tasks, asks questions, and probes deeper based on the participant's responses. 

Unmoderated remote research , on the other hand, does not involve live interaction between the researcher and the participant. 

Instead, participants are given a set of tasks to complete at their own pace, and their interactions with the product are recorded for the researcher to review later. 

When should you conduct remote user research?

Remote user research can be conducted at various stages of the product development cycle and in different situations. 

Having said that, it’s not always the best solution and you should consider carefully whether it’s the right type of user research for your unique needs. Sometimes, a combination of remote and in-person methods can provide the most comprehensive insights.

Here are some instances when you might benefit from conducting remote user research:

You have a global audience 

If your product or service is designed for a global audience, remote user research might be the only available method you can use. 

You have time and cost constraints

Remote user research can save time and money as it eliminates the need for travel, venue hire, and other logistics associated with in-person research. If you're working with a tight budget or schedule, remote research can be a cost-effective and efficient solution while providing the results you need. 

Your product is in the early stages of development

In the initial stages of product development , you may want to understand the general needs, motivations, and pain points of your target users. Remote research methods, such as surveys or interviews, can help you gather these insights quickly and from a larger sample size.

You need to run usability testing

If you want to understand how users interact with your product, remote usability testing can be a valuable method. It allows you to observe users as they navigate your product in their natural environment, providing authentic insights.

You can’t hold in-person sessions

In situations where in-person meetings are not possible, for instance, during a pandemic or if you don’t have access to office space, remote user research allows you to continue gathering user insights despite the logistical obstacles.

You need to run longitudinal studies

If you're conducting a study that requires tracking user behavior over an extended period , remote research can be more feasible and less intrusive than in-person research.

You need quick feedback 

Tools for unmoderated remote research can provide quick feedback on specific elements of your product, such as a new feature or design concept, without the hassle of arranging in-person sessions.

Tools used in remote user research

Remote user research can be conducted in various ways , depending on your research objectives, the nature of your product, and your target users. Both moderated and unmoderated remote user research these types can be utilized through various methods.

Moderated remote user research tools

In moderated research, a researcher and participant meet virtually in real time. The researcher guides the participant through tasks, asking questions, and gathering insights along the way.

Some of the common moderated remote user research methods include:

Remote interviews

In a remote interview, a researcher and participant meet virtually . The researcher guides the conversation, asking questions and probing deeper into the participant's responses.

Remote interviews allow for an in-depth exploration of a user's experiences, behaviors, motivations, and challenges. 

Unlike in-person interviews, remote interviews can be conducted with anyone, anywhere, making it easier to recruit a diverse range of participants.

Remote usability testing

Remote usability testing is a cornerstone of moderated remote user research. In these sessions, participants interact with a product or prototype while the researcher observes and guides the process in real time, often asking questions and noting user behaviors and reactions. 

Conducting usability tests remotely allows users to interact with the product in their natural environment, where they may feel more comfortable and behave more authentically.

This method can reflect how users will interact with a product in real-world conditions, as they'll be using their own devices and internet connections, more accurately than in-lab testing.

Focus groups

A remote focus group involves a small group of participants discussing a topic or interacting with a product under the guidance of a moderator. 

In a focus group, participants can build on each other's ideas, leading to a more in-depth discussion and potentially uncovering insights that may not surface in individual interviews.

You can also gather insights from multiple users simultaneously, which can be more time-efficient compared to conducting individual interviews.

Unmoderated remote user research tools

In unmoderated research, participants complete tasks independently, without real-time guidance from a researcher. The interactions are usually recorded for later review. The most popular methods include:

As one of the most commonly used tools, user surveys offer a quick and easy way to gather insights from a large number of users simultaneously. 

They’re excellent for collecting quantitative data, which can be statistically analyzed to identify trends, correlations, and generalizable findings. This can complement qualitative insights gathered from other research methods.

Surveys can be used to measure a number of UX metrics , including the Net Promoter Score : 

Since every participant is presented with the same set of questions in the same order, surveys ensure consistency across responses, making the data easier to analyze and compare.

Diary studies 

In a diary study, participants are asked to keep a record of their experiences, thoughts, and behaviors over a period of time.

One of the key benefits of diary studies is that they capture insights as they happen in real time. This reduces the risk of memory bias that can occur in methods where participants are asked to recall past experiences.

This method allows you to observe users in their natural environment, interacting with a product or service as they would in their day-to-day life.

It’s usually conducted over a longer period, often weeks or even months, allowing you to understand long-term behaviors, patterns, and changes over time.

Card sorting

In a card sorting exercise, participants are given a set of 'cards' each labeled with a piece of content or functionality. They are then asked to sort these cards into groups that make sense to them. 

This method can help you design a user-centric information architecture or navigation structure for your product. By understanding how your users naturally categorize information, you can create interfaces that align with their mental models, making your product easier to understand and navigate.

Card sorting is relatively easy to conduct and it can be used at different stages of product development. For participants, the task of sorting cards into groups is intuitive and requires no special skills or knowledge.

Tree testing

This method involves providing participants with a simplified version of your site's structure (the "tree") and then assigning tasks that require them to navigate this tree. 

It allows you to assess whether users can successfully find items in your site structure and identify any areas that are causing confusion or are difficult to navigate.

Tree testing provides quantitative data, such as success rates, time taken, and the paths taken by users. 

Automated usability testing

In automated usability testing, users interact with a product or prototype while their screen and sometimes their voice are recorded. These sessions are completed independently, without a researcher present, and the interactions are analyzed later. 

This method allows you to gather data from a larger number of participants in a shorter amount of time compared to moderated sessions.

Since there's no researcher present, users may interact with the product more naturally, leading to more authentic insights.

Participants can complete the test at a time and place that suits them, which can increase participation rates and the diversity of your user sample.

Depending on the tools used, automated usability testing can provide both quantitative data (including task completion rates, error rates, or time-on-task) and qualitative data (such as user comments or areas of the screen where users clicked or hovered).

What are the pros and cons of remote research?

Remote user research has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. Understanding both can help you decide when it's the most suitable method for your research needs .

Pros of remote user research

Geographical flexibility

Remote research allows you to access users worldwide, enabling a diverse range of user perspectives. It breaks down geographical barriers that traditional in-person research can't overcome.

Cost and time efficiency

By reducing the need for travel, accommodation, and other logistics, it can save plenty of resources.

Authenticity

Users in a remote user research study participate from their own environment, which can lead to more authentic and natural responses.

Convenience

Participants can choose a time that suits them, increasing the likelihood of participation and reducing no-shows.

Quick turnaround

With tools that support unmoderated remote research, you can collect and analyze data quickly, making it ideal when rapid feedback is needed.

Cons of remote user research

Lack of physical context  

In remote research, you lose the ability to observe non-verbal cues such as body language, which can sometimes provide useful insights.

Technical issues

Participants may encounter issues with their internet connection, software compatibility, or other technical problems that could affect the research session.

Less control

In an unmoderated setting, you have less control over the environment and the participant's actions during the test, which could lead to incomplete or off-task results.

Limited assistance

If a participant struggles with a task or a technical issue during an unmoderated session, there's no immediate help available.

Privacy concerns

Recording screens or using certain software might raise privacy concerns among participants, and it's important you let them know how the data will be used and handle it securely. 

Automate your user surveys with Survicate

A user-centric mindset is key to success in the digital world, and remote user research is your golden ticket to unlocking invaluable insights. 

Now that you're well-versed in remote user research, it's time to put that knowledge into practice.

If you plan to include surveys as part of your user research, the easiest way to do so is by using an automated tool such as Survicate. With tens of templates and in-built analytics, it provides everything you need to get started. Sign up for free and start collecting user insights. 

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Remote User Research & Usability Methods

• January 4, 2016

If you’re working with an audience across the globe, all under budget and time constraints, remote user testing can provide the rich data to help make informed decisions.

We all want to create products that make people’s lives easier and more enjoyable, products that delight people around us and ourselves. Creating great experiences starts with understanding your users, their behavior, motivations and goals.

Remote user studies are ideal for getting insights from end-users who may be located anywhere in the world. These studies provide access to a larger pool of potential customers, cut out travel time, and can significantly lower the cost of usability testing.

In this article I would like to discuss methods and tools for effective remote UX research, as well as how to make sure your research findings are put to good use.

When remote study works

Remote user research has two key advantages over traditional testing:

• Flexibility. The remote method allows you to connect with your customers from anywhere in the world. There’s also greater user diversity and a quicker set-up time thanks to online implementation.
• Environment. User interviews are conducted in the participant’s usual working environment with the hardware and software they use on a day-to-day basis, or while they are on the go.

When remote study doesn’t work

There are a lots of reasons you might want to conduct an in-person study instead.

• Information security. You may want to keep control over confidential test materials.
• Inability to use screen sharing. Some studies may require you to talk to users who don’t have reliable high-speed internet connections.
• Face and body movements. In some studies, it’s importance to be able to see the user’s body or face, or track eye movements.

When you need to do a lab study, use reliable equipment, keep the interface 100% secure, and monitor the user’s physical movements when you can’t use screen sharing tools.

Moderated vs automated research

Remote research can be divided into two categories: moderated and unmoderated research.

Creating great experiences starts with understanding your users, their behavior and goals

In moderated research, a moderator speaks directly to the participants. Moderated research allows you to gather in-depth qualitative feedback, as the researcher can make personal observations about the participants.

Since moderated studies provide lots of context and insight into exactly what users are doing and why, these methods are best for research projects that are looking for new ideas to come from observation.

Unlike moderated research, automated research does not involve any conversation between the researcher and the participants. Instead, you use online tools and services to collect information automatically.

You can conduct automated research to get feedback from a large number of participants on a specific set of tasks. Automated research is usually quantitative and good at addressing specific questions like:

• What percent of users can successfully log in?
• How long does it take for users to find a product?

If all you need is performance data, and not the reasons users behave the way they do, then automated testing is for you.

How to design a remote user study

There are several similarities between planning a standard or a remote user study, as you’ll need to establish:

• What. You need to decide what you want to learn in the study. Before starting, everyone on the team should agree on the questions you plan to ask and the assumptions you plan to test.
• Who. You’ll need to carefully recruit people based on your goals—do you want to study existing customers, prospective customers, or representative customers? I personally like a collaborative approach here where you work with your team to identify goals for the study, as well list the characteristics of the people you want to interview or exclude from your study. After you’ve done this, figure out precise criteria you can use to identify those people and write questions to screen them.
• How. Determine the best research methodology for a particular study that will allow you to reach your goals, and write an interview guide or that keeps you on track during the interviews.

Next, I would like to focus on “Who” and “How” steps and discuss what is different when you plan and manage a remote study.

Recruiting for web or mobile study

Live recruiting.

It is very important to understand the usage context of an interface—the physical environment where people are using a product. Remote research allows you to instantly recruit people who are right in the middle of performing the task you’re interested in, in a process called Time-Aware Research.

Time-awareness means that users are interested in what they’re doing because they’re doing it for their own reasons, not because you’re asking them to.

(For more details on Time-aware research, I highly recommend  Nate Bolt’s amazing book “Remote Research.” It also has a lot of practical tips and templates that you can apply in your own remote study).

An effective strategy for live recruiting is to use a popup form that will open the recruiting screener, which users can fill out to opt-in to your study. Alternatively, you can place a link to your survey in some noticeable spot on your site. The easiest way to create a survey is to link to a form in created in Google Forms, or use a tool like  Ethnio .

Ethnio is a customizable screener that can be placed as a pop-up on your site or accessed through a direct link to an Ethnio URL. Ethnio provides a 2-line JavaScript code, which you should place on the page where you want to intercept your users.

It will take some trial and error to determine when exactly to show the popup and the right balance between session length and incentive.

Ethnio also works to find participants in real-time from mobile apps.

For mobile survey requests, you’ll need to place code from Android or iOS libraries into your app, then trigger an Ethnio screener based on actions you define in your app.

An alternative approach is to just send a push notification to the selected audience with a request to take part in the study.

Other channels for recruiting

In addition to the channels listed above, you can also use other channels to recruit someone for a study. Use agencies when you have higher budget— Usertesting  is one such agency that screens people very thoroughly. Facebook or Craiglist ads work in some cases too.

Live recruiting is typically your best option if you have an existing site or an app. But in order to get people to participate, you’ll most likely need to provide an incentive.

The incentive amount you should offer to the participants depends heavily on whom you are looking to recruit.

From my experience the average participation incentive for a typical remote study is somewhere between $35 and $50 , which is lower than most in-person studies. For example, if you are testing doctors or lawyers, you will most likely need to hike up the amount

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who are willing to donate their time for no incentive at all. This is especially true for services with loyal users, who are quite often eager to participate in the study. They may bring up problems they have encountered with your product.

There is a  great article by Charles Liu , design researcher from KISSmetrics, sharing his experiments with recruiting people via emails with a zero budget.

One of the tips he gives is to change the conversation from “Help me” to “Could this help you?”

In the article, he shares several email templates that you can use for recruiting people for your own studies. It’s definitely worth a look.

Tools for remote UX studies

There are several different tools that can be used for remote research.

Moderated—Screen sharing & recording

In the screener form, I’ll typically ask the participants what screen sharing service is convenient for them. More often than not, Skype is the first choice, but sometimes they are not familiar with screen sharing. In this case, I suggest what better works for us.

For the remote studies at  Stanfy , we usually use the following tools:

• Skype—you can observe the face of the participant and their screen.
• Google Hangout —you can observe either their screen or face.
• GoToMeeting ($49/month) —you can observe their face and the screen, and you can also give keyboard and mouse control to the participant.

GoToMeeting lets you view your participants’ screen, and allows your participants to see and even control your screen. This feature is very useful when you want to test a mobile app launched in an emulator.

For screen recording, you can use tools such as the following:

• Camtasia Studio (Mac, PC), $150.
• IShowU HD (Mac), $60
• QuickTime (Mac), Free

The first two solutions may be a bit pricey, but they will cover all your screen recording needs. All three have nice video and audio recording options to record portions of the screen or windows.

Automated—Usability study and task elicitation

There are a number of automated tools that prompt users to perform a task and then record their behavior. If you want to learn how users interact with some part of your website or app, task elicitation is the way to go.

Task elicitation is a flexible way of getting a specific answer to common usability issues, such as the following:

• Do users have difficulty performing the task?
• How many people abandon the task, and where?
• What is the most common path users take through the interface to complete a task?
• Where do users go to perform the task and where do they expect to go?

There are several different tools you can use for task elicitation.

Loop11 .  A browser bar prompts users to perform a task. Automated analysis includes task completion rate, time on task, first click, click stream, most frequent success and fail points.

UserTesting .  Users’ spoken are captured and synced with videos of their site behavior as they perform your tasks. Videos are downloadable and can be annotated with comments. You can also see users’ demographics and system info. Users are recruited by UserTesting.com from a preselected panel.

Moderated or automated mobile studies

When running a mobile study, there are two different tools I recommend.

Lookback .  Lookback   helps you learn how people are actually using your mobile app. It records the screen of your app, along with the face and voice of the user, as well as all their taps and touches. With recordings like these, it’s super simple for anybody to send you feedback or bug reports, straight from within your app.

Lookback for Android records everything on screen, including any native app, mobile website or prototype. (iOS blocks third-party apps from recording this data).

Once a record is completed and uploaded, it appears on Lookback’s website where you and your collaborators can view, discuss, rename and share them.

Unicorns.io .  Unicorns is an app that streams whatever you’re doing on your phone—playing a game, texting, swiping through Tinder, etc. Unicorns allows you to conduct usability tests, showcase pre-release apps or upcoming features, and chat with the users live.

PlaytestCloud .  PlaytestCloud is an online service for crowdsourced testing for mobile games. The video recordings show you the player’s screen during their playthrough and highlight their touches on the screen. You can also discuss and share the videos inside your team.

Invisionapp . Invisionapp allows you to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions, and animations. You can share a link with your users to open on their desktop or mobile device, then conduct usability tests with the users live. Invisionapp is great for quickly demonstrating concepts, collecting feedback in one place and making rapid iterations.

Recently, Invisionapp partnered with Lookback so that you can record a user as they navigate through your Invisionapp prototype on their iOS device. You can capture their screen as well as audio and video reactions.

UserTesting .  I already mentioned this tool before in relation to un-moderated web studies, but it works great for mobile studies as well. You can watch users complete the tasks you specify (including gestures), and listen to them speak their minds as they interact with your app. Their mobile recorder works with whatever is displayed on the mobile device, including wireframes and prototypes.

Remote research allows a large number of observers to record their thoughts and observations at their computers.

Having developers, project managers, marketers and more observe and engage with the research can make them more invested in the outcome. Often, that makes it more likely that the findings will be applied.

Including everyone might sound like a waste, but it’s very important. Each team member has a unique perspective and will interpret your findings in different ways, leading to a more complete understanding of how people interact with your app/product/service.

Making notes

While watching the videos, the goal for the team is to capture insights and ideas about what the user is saying and doing. The tools we use to do this are simple:

• Post-it notes in three colors

Instruct everyone to capture two kinds of things on paper while watching. Write important insights (good and bad) learned from the user on the different Post-it notes.

Let’s say yellow is for good and pink is for bad. Write any specific implementation ideas on green post-it notes. Then, ask everyone to write each down on their post-it notes using a thick, black marker.

Combine everyone’s insights

After several remote sessions, gather around a white board and ask everyone to put their Post-its on the wall. The goal of this step is to distill everyone’s notes into a common list of insights.

Once data is grouped together, work with the team to try and find trends, patterns, and themes that are relevant to the research question. Then, discuss them.

Make sure you do it all together—get the goals and questions from the team, then do the up-front work conducting a survey or getting participants to the interview. The team should be there during the interviews, usability tests, and debriefing sessions, so they can observe users with their own eyes.

Remote collaboration 

One really important aspect of a collaborative process during your research study is that if any member of your team is remote, then everyone should be remote.

Why? We at Stanfy did a lot of experiments with this, trying to involve a remote person via Google Hangout or GoToMeeting, but it never worked. Sooner or later, all discussions start to happen between people who are in the same space, ignoring those who are outside.

There are many tools that you could use for remote team collaboration. With the design team at Stanfy we tried Murally , Realtimeboard and Boardthing . They have different pricing models but basically do the similar job – providing you with a shared canvas for online brainstorming and collaboration, which allows you to visually organize your ideas. Murally currently is our favorite space for such collaborative work.

Here’s the quick 6-step summary of a test setup:

• Choose a research method based on what you want to find out.
• Select the tool or service that best supports your research goals.
• Create and post a recruiting screener and confirm valid participants.
• Design a set of tasks or write an interview guide.
• Conduct research session and pay out the incentives (don’t forget to include your team).
• Summarize findings together with your team.

If you’re working with an audience scattered across the globe, all under budget and time constraints, remote user testing can provide the rich data to help make informed design decisions, and to understand how people interact and behave with the interface you’ve made.

Images by Anna Iurchenko.

• Data visualization , Decision Architecture , Design , Design Tools and Software , Heuristics , Internal Company Dynamics , Mobile Applications , Mobile Technology , Research Methods and Techniques , Research Tools and Software , Team Dynamics , Technology , Usability , User Acceptance Testing , User Adoption , Video , Visual Design , Working With Stakeholders , Workshops and Brainstorming

Anna Lurchenko , Anna Iurchenko is a UX Designer and Sketchnoter. She is driven to create products that improve people’s day to day life. She is working at Stanfy where she helps clients create meaningful and engaging user experiences for their customers. Anna loves to visualize ideas, and sketching serves her as the great tool for connecting her mind and creativity. Keep up with her on Medium or Twitter .

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The Best Remote UX Research Tools

Looking to do some remote ux research you’ll need the right tools to get the job done. here are our top seven..

Usability testing and UX research  can be complex and difficult to carry out remotely if you’re not operating in the world of remote testing/research. So let’s break down some of the best approaches and tools!

Thankfully, the world of UX research started setting up shop in online/remote-friendly platforms long before most of us started setting offices up in our kitchens.

And why? Because not every design team is working to solve problems for users who live in their locale. There are tons of remote ux research tools and usability testing platforms out there to choose from. The only real question is which one(s) you should choose.

We’ve gone through some of the industry’s top tools for remote research and testing, and we’ve rounded up our top seven. We’ll offer a brief summary of each tool, along with a price breakdown, and what other people are saying about it.

Here are the tools/approaches we’ll look at:

• DIY UX research
• Final thoughts

1. DIY UX research

If you take a do-it-yourself approach to remote user research and usability testing, you can find as many approaches and solutions as you can ways to configure your favorite video conferencing and screen recording tools. Determine your objectives and consider whether this kind of fully moderated testing is what you’re looking to do—and whether you have (or need) any analytic or reporting tools to distill the results of your testing and research.

The upside: It’s cheap.

The downside: You’re using multiple tools to accomplish a smaller number of research and testing tasks. Every session will need to be moderated and the process of converting qualitative results into quantitative data and reports will have do be done manually.

Price breakdown: Free or however much you’re already paying (or willing to pay) for full licenses on your favorite tools.

How to do it: This approach was actually mentioned in several Instagram comments from practicing designers in response to our post about these remote tools.

Take your favorite video conferencing tool with a built-in capacity for screen sharing ( Skype , for example) and your favorite screen recording software ( OBS Studio , ScreenFlow , Camtasia , etc.), and run the platforms simultaneously to interview users, assign test tasks, observe, and record sessions to return to later.

G Suite for business includes a recording feature in it’s version of Google Hangouts that can be an easy all-in-one solution, if this is available to you. This approach is all about taking what you already have or can easily acquire and making it work well for the kinds of testing and research you need to do.

If there are tools you’re already familiar with—or if you can learn them quickly—and if you don’t mind your testing and research methods being, to some extent, pulled together from different platforms, this is an excellent solution that can be tailored to fit your budget.

Even if the DIY approach is more your style, the other tools detailed in this guide still might come in handy. Try the free versions of any platform that intrigues you—that kind of experimentation can help you generate ideas for how to approach your own DIY testing and research. And if you’d like even more ideas for tools and platforms, check out this video:

If you’d rather have your testing and research process and results contained and combined with some kind of analytic/reporting mechanism or aid, you’ll want to go with a platform designed specifically to that end—keep reading!

2.  Crazy Egg

This platform gathers wild amounts of data and offers a wide variety of analytic tools and options for your live website—including A/B testing, heatmaps, scrollmaps, click reports, and user session recordings. It’s even helpful with content management, and provides a handy visual editor to help you make changes quickly in response to your data.

Price breakdown: No matter your team size, you can start with a 30-day free trial and then jump into a plan for anywhere from $24 to $249 per month (billed annually). The primary differences between plans are in the tracked pageviews and recordings per month, as well as storage and product support.

What other people are saying about Crazy Egg

According to designers on Capterra , Crazy Egg is an excellent tool—with a few limitations. We’ve rounded up a few pros and cons:

Pro: “Crazy Egg does what it needs to, deliver valuable insights through various features to make informed decisions to increase conversion and user experience on your website. Crazy Egg was the first paid product I used for heat mapping, scroll, click data etc. It served me well and is a must have tool in the marketing tech stack.”

Pro: “CrazyEgg provides all kinds of helpful insights about the particular pages you decide to track. You can see how far users are scrolling down your page […] You can also see where people are clicking – including “non-clickable” elements, like images, so you then know you should link not just text but also an image. There’s also a spreadsheet of everywhere people have clicked, so you can view the data however it’s most comfortable to you. You can track both publicly accessible pages and password-protected ones; you just have to install a browser extension to capture initial screenshots of protected pages.”

Con: “I didn’t like to have to set up the pages to track in Crazy Egg vs. other products that allowed you to look at any page without setting them up. As a small-mid sized business budget also became a reason for switching away from Crazy Egg with other competitive products that delivered the same or better experience at less cost as we scaled.”

Con: “Crazyegg only has heat mapping with very limited visualizations. There are other services out there that provide more information than CrazyEgg.”

HotJar’s focus is on your actual users on your actual website or app. While you can use Hotjar for surveys, polls, feedback, and visitor recordings, this platform’s real selling points are its heatmaps and its focus on conversion funnels . All of these features combined can help you really get inside your users’ minds and see where they actually click, move, and scroll through your pages, as well as when and where they leave your site (so you can focus efforts on understanding why and adding value right when they need it).

Price breakdown: No matter your team size, you can use the basic version of Hotjar for free, though you’ll have limited data collection and reports. You can get a lot more out of this platform for as little as $29/month (and there’s a 15-day free trial).

What the pros think about HotJar

According to professionals on Capterra , here are the pros and cons:

Pro: “Overall HotJar is a great platform and I am one of their biggest advocates. I would recommend HotJar to anyone looking to enhance their understanding of on-site traffic and conversion.”

Pro: “Insights you won’t find on any free platforms and it’s the best value in its class. Pair it with Google Analytics and UTM tracking for a better picture of what people are doing on your website.”

Pro: “A clean look and a professional UX makes it my favourite tool. The free plan also has enough views/actions/events, allowing it for a good round of testing before going fully paid.”

Con: “I wish they made heat maps that segment by marketing channel like Crazy Egg. We have both and it’s kinda a lot of money for both. I also dislike how it’s hard to get iframes to be seen in recordings and remove HTML elements that we don’t want to see in maps such as cookie banners.”

Con: “Sometimes we need more flexibility on tuning the conditions to show pop-ups for surveys, etc, which Hotjar does not provide.”

4. Lookback

Lookback is fresh on our radar and it made the list because of its versatility and direct attention to designing for collaboration (it includes a collaborative dashboard!). The platform is good for both moderated or unmoderated testing of your website or app—and there are built-in features that allow you to record interviews, take notes (timestamped to the video), or “tag” a colleague during a testing session. You can even store highlights from particularly insightful moments to share with your team later. The platform also records screen touch—so you won’t just see what page your users are on, but where they’re touching their screens. You can even collect metadata on participants’ devices to get better insight on where and who your users are.

Price breakdown: Start with a free trial and then switch to a plan for $49-99 per month (differences are mainly in exporting capabilities), or talk to Lookback about a quote for an “Enterprise” plan (with unlimited testing, observers, and other perks).

What people think about Lookback

Have a look at Capterra , and you’ll see people mostly love the platform:

Pro: “I LOVE that observers can enter and exit the virtual observer room as needed, it saves a lot of pinging and distractions for the research participant.”

Pro: “This tool made it really easy to smoothly run a research session with a team. Everything is in one place. Recording, note-taking and comments were all in the interface. I felt confidence that my recordings were saved and had no problems at all. Great tool for doing usability studies in particular – today’s sessions used a prototype and Lookback saved the participants from having to go through multiple steps to access it.”

Con: “You must download an extra app to conduct tests on smartphones, AND a web extension on each browser you want to use.”

Con: “Only works on Chrome. iOS often doesn’t work properly. Often complaints of poor connection, even when the connection is fine with other software. My participants often have technical difficulties. The exported clips are in an unpopular file format that I can’t use with other tools without converting.”

This platform takes an novel, somewhat gamified approach to user research and could be good for a variety of task-based, unmoderated user and usability testing, hiring test participants, and collecting metrics and feedback into reports. Maze is compatible with prototypes created on industry-standard design platforms InVision, Figma, Marvel, and Sketch. They even have some fun, free demos you can walk through to see how it works.

Price breakdown: If there’s only one designer conducting testing, there’s a limited free version, or a full version for $42/month (billed annually).  If you’re working with a team, you’ll want to look at Maze’s pricing for teams .

What other designers are saying about Maze

There are fewer reviews out there for Maze, but several designers we love claim this as their favorite tool, and we can see why!

According to designers on Capterra and ProductHunt , Maze is a great platform once you figure out how to use it. The paid version of the platform might be too pricey for some teams, but the interface itself is intuitive, polished, and gamified. It’s certainly worth trying out for free and seeing if it suits your team and your test participants.

Pro: “My testers love it, they think it is fun to use. it makes product management so streamlined and has a wealth of data in it.”

Con: “Expensive.”

6. Userbrain

This platform is good for task-based, unmoderated, continuous testing on your website or app. Userbrain is compatible with live sites and apps, or prototypes built on nearly any platform. You simply submit your live or prototyped product and clarify the task(s) users should complete, then wait to receive recordings of users working through your test task. In the recordings, you’ll see the full screen capture of the interface and how users are navigating it, as well as hear them talk out their process as they go. If you’re on a tight budget, you won’t be guaranteed excellent test participants, but for continuous testing with a wide and diverse audience, this could be a great tool for your team.

Price breakdown: A one time payment of $29 will cover one user test, or you can pay a subscription rate of $19 per month, per user test. You can pay an extra $49 to invite your own test participants (rather than the random mix you’ll get otherwise).

What other designers are saying about Userbrain

Heading back over to Capterra , people who are already using this platform have plenty to say about it:

Pro: “First of all I had to select software that could meet our financial requirements […] which has a pay as you go model or a monthly subscription, rather than a big annual plan which can be quite a problem with small startups. [We trialed] some other software, some famous ones, but the annual plans and the lack of pay as you go model was the problem. I purchased some credits and started testing! The second thing I really liked is the rapid help. With the first video, the prototype did not work and the customer support replied [to] my questions right away. Wasn’t really expecting that! Thirdly, the test works well. The users were really clear, and speaking their minds. No problem with that part at all! I can easily share the video with my designers, and take notes. As we are trying to move away from in office testing, I guess this software will be solving that problem easily.”

Pro: “Userbrain allows us to get feedback for our product designs and root out basic usability issues very quickly.”

Con: “The quality of testers varies a lot, not possible to define the operating system of testers.”

Con: “I found the participant quality a little bit hit and miss; some were really great, others pretty rubbish. Luckily the prices were reasonably cheap so managed to get some decent data from the broad spread of participants. I would have liked to be able to screen participants for certain criteria, as I had to use a different software for research involving more specific communities.”

7. UserZoom

UserZoom is a powerful all-in-one tool for moderated or unmoderated usability testing, benchmarking, information architecture research, surveys, test participant sourcing, analytics, and reporting for any digital product. Powerful, comprehensive, and pricey. This platform is a great option if you’ve got a generous budget to work with as plans are fully customized to your business, and UserZoom offers expensive training and support–and the price reflects that.

Price breakdown: Pricing for this platform isn’t readily available on their website as they set up custom plans with their clients. Because they provide training and support, plans start at $25k per year.

What the pros say about UserZoom

According to reviewers on G2 :

Pro: “UserZoom is very easy to use so that you can easily get your clients [to] provide feedback for you. They don’t need to have specific software knowledge to complete this task for you. You can customize your quality surveys for each client according to the solution you provided them with and then extract useful feedback from their feedback.”

Pro: “The best thing about UserZoom is the flexibility. You can use paths and logic to give people radically different experiences depending on how they answer questions and that’s really cool. It does what it says [it will] do, providing a guided-as-necessary unmoderated experience which saves time and money. It’s also fairly brand able, which is nice. They’re also evolving in a rapid and thoughtful way—I like their roadmap.”

Con: “There’s some amount of rigidity in weird places that requires customer service intervention. For instance certain screens or phrasing around the on boarding process. It feels a tad invasive, which can make it hard to get my customers to do what I ask them to do. These are pretty minor though, it’s a good tool.”

Con: “I feel like other tools have better video manipulation tools for scrubbing through past user videos, saving certain highlight clips, and compiling them into a presentation video. This is something that is super important to me.”

8. Final thoughts

Really, the tools you use for remote usability testing and user research will depend entirely upon the kinds of testing, analytics, and reports you want to prioritize—as well as the budget you’re working with. And don’t assume that expensive tools are overpriced or that cheaper tools are less valuable! It really does depend mostly on the goals of the testing, what kind of reports you want, and where your product is at in its life cycle.

As you consider your options, it’s also important to remember that one platform may be well suited to your needs for a season—and that a different approach might work better later down the road.

Our recommendation: clarify your needs and goals and then hop into a few free trials to see what feels best. It may be that you end up with a pricier option after all, or maybe a DIY approach is what’s best for your team. Whatever the case may be, rest assured that effective usability testing and user research is certainly within your reach—without having to go into the office!

If you’d like to learn more about usability testing and user research, CareerFoundry’s free UX Research for Beginners Course is a great place to start. Or you can check out these articles:

• Usability testing: everything you need to know
• How to conduct user research like a pro
• 5 Challenges for remote UX designers (and how to solve them)
• Mistakes to avoid in your UX research portfolio

Tetra Insights

5 Best Practices to Master Remote User Research in 2023

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, understanding your users is paramount to success. Remote user research has emerged as a versatile and powerful tool to gather insights from a diverse pool of participants worldwide. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the benefits, essential tech tools, participant sourcing strategies, and best practices for conducting remote user research.

Table of Contents

Unlocking global insights with remote research.

Traditionally, in-person research limited access to local populations or incurred significant travel costs. Remote research, however, offers unparalleled access to a diverse global audience. This approach not only proves budget-friendly but also enhances research accuracy by allowing you to recruit ideal participants for each project. Convenience is key, as participants can join interviews from anywhere, reducing the need for costly incentives and mitigating the risk of missed sessions.

According to a report by Statista, the number of smartphone users worldwide is projected to  reach 5.1 billion by 2028 . This proliferation of internet-connected devices has expanded the potential participant pool for remote research to an unprecedented scale. Unlike traditional in-person research, which often relied on local populations or required teams to travel, remote research allows researchers to tap into this vast global audience with ease.

Moreover, the convenience remote research offers to participants is a driving force behind its success. In a world where time is a precious commodity, remote research allows participants to join interviews or complete research tasks from the comfort of their own homes or workplaces. This not only reduces the need for costly incentives but also minimizes the risk of missed research sessions due to scheduling conflicts or logistical issues.

As a result, researchers can engage a more diverse and globally representative group of participants. Ultimately enhancing the accuracy and relevance of their research findings.

Understanding the Remote Research Landscape

Before embarking on your remote user research journey, you should understand the evolving landscape. The proliferation of digital tools and platforms has made remote research more accessible than ever. However, it also means that competition for participants’ attention is fierce. To stand out and ensure the success of your research, consider the following strategies:

• Engaging Content:  Craft compelling and concise invitations that convey the importance of your research. Highlight the benefits of participation and set clear expectations for the session’s duration.
• Scheduling Flexibility:  Acknowledge the diverse time zones of your potential participants. Offer flexible scheduling options to accommodate their availability.
• Tech-Readiness:  Ensure that participants are comfortable with the technology you’ll be using for the research. Provide clear instructions and conduct tech checks before the session to minimize disruptions.
• Inclusivity:  Be mindful of accessibility requirements. Provide closed captions for video interviews and consider participants with disabilities to create an inclusive research environment.

Building Your Lean Remote Research Tech Stack

Building a lean remote research tech stack is a strategic move that can significantly enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your research endeavors. Let’s delve a bit deeper into each phase of this essential toolkit:

Strategy and Planning

Collaboration is at the heart of successful research planning. Tools like Trello, Notion, and Google Docs provide researchers with versatile platforms for teamwork and feedback. These tools ensure that your research planning process remains transparent and inclusive. For instance, Trello, a favorite among researchers and project managers, utilizes a Kanban system for task management, streamlining workflows and reducing complexity.

By leveraging these collaborative tools, your research team can work cohesively, share perspectives, and foster a sense of involvement among team members. This phase sets the stage for a well-structured research plan, laying the groundwork for success.

Research Execution

The landscape of research execution has evolved over the years, with accessible platforms like Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Webex offering robust capabilities for conducting remote interviews and connecting with research subjects. These tools eliminate the need for complex and costly enterprise platforms, making them a cost-effective choice for researchers.

In fact, more than half of researchers now rely on these user-friendly technologies to interact with research subjects, users, and customers. Their ease of use and accessibility enable researchers to focus on gathering valuable insights rather than grappling with technical complexities.

Mastering Remote Research: 5 Best Practices

Mastering remote research requires a set of best practices that can elevate the quality of your insights. Here are some actionable tips to help you make the most out of your remote user research:

1. Embrace Dead Air for Thoughtful Responses

One of the distinctive aspects of remote research is that it often occurs through video conferencing. During interviews, it’s crucial to embrace moments of “dead air”. Pauses where participants gather their thoughts. Instead of rushing to fill these silences, allow participants the time they need to articulate their ideas fully. This approach fosters more insightful and meaningful responses.

Tetra can assist here by providing tools for real-time annotation and tagging during interviews. This allows you to make notes during these pauses, ensuring that you capture every nuance and detail of the participant’s response.

2. Leverage Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions and body language, convey a significant portion of communication. While conducting remote research, be attentive to these cues as they can provide valuable insights beyond what’s being said verbally. With video interviews becoming the norm, you have the advantage of observing participants’ facial expressions.

Tetra complements this practice by allowing you to review recorded interviews. When you revisit these recordings, pay close attention to participants’ facial expressions and vocal inflections. These subtle indicators can reveal emotions, preferences, and reactions that may not be explicitly stated.

3. Implement Effective Screener Surveys

To ensure that you’re engaging with participants who align with your research goals, create well-defined screener surveys. These surveys act as a crucial filtering mechanism, helping you identify and select participants who fit your target profile. Tetra Insights can streamline this process by providing a platform for creating and distributing screener surveys.

As you screen potential participants, consider including questions related to their comfort with remote interviews and the technology they have access to. By using a combination of Tetra’s screening capabilities and your own thorough screening process, you can ensure that your research participants are a perfect match for your study.

4. Conduct Dry Runs for Technical Readiness

Remote sessions can sometimes encounter technical difficulties that disrupt the flow of your research. To mitigate this, consider conducting “dry runs” with participants before the actual interviews. A dry run allows you to test the technology, ensuring that participants have a smooth experience during the real interview.

Tetra assists in this phase by providing a platform for creating and managing dry run sessions. These rehearsals not only address potential technical issues but also make participants more comfortable with the remote interview setup.

5. Analyze and Share Insights

After conducting remote research, the next critical step is to analyze the gathered data and share insights with your team. Tetra is designed to simplify this process. Its real-time annotation and tagging features make it easy to categorize and highlight key findings during interviews.

Post-interview, you can use Tetra to generate shareable highlight reels based on themes or topics that you’ve tagged within your research. These features streamline the analysis phase, ensuring that you can quickly access and present the most critical insights to your team.

Additionally, Tetra allows for easy sharing of insights with team members or stakeholders through integration with platforms like Airtable, Notion, Jira, or Slack. This seamless flow of insights enhances collaboration and decision-making across your organization.

In Conclusion

Remote user research has evolved into a tool for businesses striving to comprehend and cater to their diverse global user base effectively. The advantages of remote research are clear: it offers unmatched accessibility, enhances cost-effectiveness, and streamlines the research process. However, the true power of remote user research lies in how well it’s executed and integrated into your organization’s decision-making framework.

When embracing the benefits of remote research, you open doors to a world of possibilities. The global reach of remote research allows you to tap into diverse markets, ensuring that your insights reflect the rich tapestry of your user base. Whether your users are scattered across continents or within your own city, remote research bridges the geographical gap. Offering a deeper understanding of their needs, preferences, and pain points. The flexibility and convenience of remote interviews and surveys facilitate a more diverse participant pool, ensuring you’re hearing from a wide range of voices.

Building an efficient tech stack is pivotal to the success of your remote research endeavors. Tools like Trello, Notion, and Google Docs enhance collaboration and transparency during planning stages, while platforms like Tetra empower you to analyze, tag, and share insights seamlessly. This tech stack acts as your research companion. Make sure you capture, categorize, and communicate insights with precision.

Remote user research is the compass that guides modern businesses toward user-centric innovation and global success. By leveraging its accessibility, building an efficient tech stack, and adhering to best practices, organizations can unlock invaluable insights that fuel informed decision-making and ensure they remain at the forefront of their industries.

Ready to Elevate Your Remote Research Game?

Subscribe to Tetra’s Free Account  now and harness the most powerful Remote User Research tools. Free of charge:

• AI-Powered Analysis:  Unlock the power of real-time video and audio analysis to enhance your research process.
• Live Recording and Streaming:  Real-time generated interactive transcripts. Making it easy to revisit and analyze your research sessions.
• Live Video Tagging:  Automatic tags based on your customized taxonomy.
• Generate Highlight Reels:  Create shareable highlight reels based on themes or topics within your research.
• Create Actionable Research Templates:  Craft customizable research templates. Streamlining your projects’ workflow from start to finish.
• Unlimited Collaboration:  Effortless collaboration with unlimited user access. Invite as many users as you need to contribute to the success of your research projects.

Subscribe now and experience the future of user research!

Want to Learn More About Remote User Research?

We’ve got you covered! Download our extensive  Guide to Mastering Remote User Research . In this comprehensive resource, you’ll find:

• In-Depth Strategies: Discover advanced strategies to conduct remote user research effectively, ensuring you gather the most valuable insights.
• Expert Tips: Learn from seasoned researchers who share their insights and tips for optimizing your remote research processes.
• Tool Recommendations: Explore the latest tools and technologies that can enhance your remote research toolkit.
• Case Studies: Gain inspiration from real-world case studies showcasing successful remote user research implementations.
• Actionable Insights: Find actionable takeaways that you can immediately apply to your research projects.

Whether you’re a seasoned researcher looking to refine your remote research skills or just starting on your journey. This guide is a valuable resource to help you navigate the evolving landscape of user research.

The Definitive Guide to Remote User Research

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Remote ux work: guidelines and resources.

March 29, 2020 2020-03-29

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When it comes to conducting user research, presenting UX work, or collaborating with other team members or stakeholders, we know that face-to-face interaction can have a lot of advantages: It’s easier for participants to build trust and rapport in person than remotely, and attendees are likely to pay attention and be cooperative for longer.

However, we can’t always conduct UX activities face to face. Sometimes, budget or time limitations, travel restrictions, or other unforeseen circumstances make in-person sessions impossible, unaffordable, or even unsafe. In these cases, remote sessions can offer immense value in maintaining the flow of insights and ideas.  

Additionally, remote UX sessions offer many benefits that in-person sessions do not, regardless of the circumstances:

• Flexibility in project funds: Remote sessions lower travel expenses. This reduction might free up monetary resources for other valuable activities, such as recruiting additional research participants, doing extra rounds of research, or providing deeper analysis.
• Increased inclusiveness: Location and space are no longer limitations with remote sessions. For user research, this means access to a more diverse group of participants to whom you might not have access locally. For UX workshops and presentations, it means nonlocal colleagues can easily attend and more people in general can participate. (However, it doesn’t mean that everyone should attend. Continue to limit attendance to relevant roles.)
• Attendee convenience: Participants might be more willing and able to attend remote sessions that don’t require them to leave their office or home. They’ll save the commute time (whether that’s a couple of hours driving to a research facility or a few days traveling to a workshop in another city), and they can participate from the comfort of their own space. Especially with remote, unmoderated research or remote, asynchronous ideation , participants can complete tasks on their own schedule.

Given these advantages, remote UX work can be a useful solution to many project challenges. This article provides guidelines and resources for transitioning 3 types of common UX activities to the digital sphere:

• Conducting user research
• Facilitating and presenting
• Collaborating and brainstorming

In This Article:

Remote user research, remote facilitating and presenting, remote collaboration and brainstorming, general guidelines for remote ux work.

Generally, we recommend in-person usability testing and user interviews whenever possible. It’s simply easier to catch and read participant body language and recognize which breaks in dialogue are appropriate times to probe or ask followup questions. However, remote testing is preferable to no testing at all, and remote user research can accelerate insights on tight timelines and budgets.

Tips for Remote User Research

• Practice using the technology: Even if you are familiar with the tool you’ll be using, do a practice run with a colleague or friend. Particularly for remote, unmoderated sessions, make sure instructions for signing in and completing tasks are clear. Plan initial pilot testing with a few users so you can adjust technology and other factors as needed, before launching the study.
• Recruit additional users: With remote, unmoderated research, you can’t help if a handful of remote interviews or usability tests are rendered useless due to unsolvable surprise technology issues on the user’s end, such as firewalls. Recruit more users than you think you need in order to create a proactive safety net.
• Plan for technology challenges: Technology mishaps will occur. Assume technology challenges will happen, and don’t panic when they do. Have a backup plan ready, such as a phone dial-in in addition to a web link for user interviews and, whenever possible, use a platform that doesn’t require participants to download anything to join the session.
• Provide instructions: If the technology tool is complex or users will be setting it up and using it over an extended time, create documentation specific to the features you’ll ask them to use. For example, for our digital diary studies using shared Evernote notebooks, we provide detailed documentation for participants on how to set up and use the platform.
• Adjust consent forms: If you’ll be recording the participant’s face, voice, or screen while conducting a remote session, update your consent form to ask for explicit permission for each of these items. If you plan on asking additional researchers to join the session or if you’ll share recordings among the team during postsession analysis, outline and ask for consent on these items, as well.

Tools for Remote User Research

Consider tools that match the needs of your study, and, as always, match appropriate research methods to your study goals. Remote research is certainly better than no research at all; however, invalid insights are not helpful in any situation.

• Remote, unmoderated sessions: Tools such as Lookback, dscout, and Userbrain help capture qualitative insights from video recordings and think-aloud narration from users. Tools such as Koncept App and Maze capture quantitative metrics such as time spent and success rate. Many platforms have both qualitative and quantitative capabilities, such as UserZoom and UserTesting. (Be sure to check whether these tools work well with mobile applications, as needed.)
• Remote, moderated sessions: Any video conferencing platform that has screensharing, call recording and the ability to schedule meetings in advance is likely to meet the needs of most teams. Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Google Hangouts Meet are frequently used. (Remember to consider platforms that do not require participants to download anything to join the meeting.)

NN/g Articles About Remote User Research

We’ve written previously about when and how to conduct both moderated and unmoderated remote usability tests, as well as put together a guide for selecting tools for remote usability testing:

• Remote Usability Tests: Moderated and Unmoderated
• Remote Moderated Usability Tests: How and Why to Do Them
• Tools for Unmoderated Usability Testing
• Unmoderated User Tests: How and Why to Do Them

Remote facilitating and presenting can feel especially daunting. Most of the challenges of in-person workshop facilitation and presentation are simply exacerbated by remote scenarios; however the right tool selection and additional planning can mitigate many of these challenges.

Tips for Remote Facilitating and Presenting

• Turn on your camera: Showing your face can help establish rapport and trust with participants and help them see you as a real person, not just a voice. This sense of connection can be critical when you are seeking buy-in or attempting to guide a group to consensus about UX or design decisions.
• Enable connection: Plan for additional time in the agenda for relationship building with a digital icebreaker , especially if participants do not know each other. For virtual UX workshops, help participants engage with each other throughout the session by encouraging everyone to respond to each other using people’s names and making use of breakout groups, polling, and chat.
• Create ground rules: At the beginning of the session, share ground rules that will help mitigate the inevitable communication challenges of digital meetings. These rules might include asking participants to agree to state their names before speaking, not speak over anyone, and avoid multitasking.
• Assign homework: Provide participants short homework assignments that allow them to practice using the technology before the session. For example, if you plan on using a virtual whiteboard application during a design workshop , you could ask participants to create an artifact to introduce themselves using that same application before the workshop, and have them share it as an icebreaker at the beginning of the workshop.
• Adapt the structure: Resist the urge to take an existing workshop structure presentation format and simply reuse it for a remote session. Think thoughtfully about how to transition activities, slides, and content to a virtual format. This includes modifying workshop agendas and presentation timelines to accommodate for technology inconveniences and additional activities that allow participants to connect and engage.

Tools for Remote Facilitating and Presenting

• Presenting UX work: Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Google Hangouts Meet are a few of the many reliable video-conferencing platforms. When selecting a platform, consider which, if any, specific features you’ll need (e.g., breakout rooms, autorecord, gallery view), and be mindful of any limitations of free versions. (For example, the free version of Zoom caps meetings with more than two attendees at 40 minutes—not something you’d want to realize for the first time in the middle of a presentation about your latest design recommendations!)
• Generative workshop activities: If your goal is to generate a large amount of ideas or other contributions, use tools that make it easy to quickly add an item to a list or virtual whiteboard. Google Draw, Microsoft Visio, Sketch, MURAL, and Miro are a few examples that might work for this context.
• Evaluative workshop activities: If your goal is to group or prioritize ideas or contributions, consider platforms with built-in prioritization matrices such as MURAL or Miro. Alternatively, use survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or CrowdSignal, or live polling apps such as Poll Everywhere that you can insert directly into your slides.

NN/g Articles About Remote Facilitating and Presenting

See our previous articles for specific guidelines on tool selection for remote UX workshops, remote journey-mapping workshops, and overall tips for presenting UX work remotely:

Tools for Remote UX Workshops

• Remote Customer Journey Mapping
• 5 Strategies for Presenting UX Remotely

Using digital tools can be an effective way for teams who are spread across locations or time zones to collaborate and brainstorm. What’s more, remote ideation actually opens up new and different options for generating group ideas, making it a useful method even for teams who could otherwise meet in the same physical space.

Tips for Remote Collaboration and Brainstorming

• Consider both synchronous and asynchronous methods: You might be able to shorten the length of virtual meetings by mixing asynchronous and synchronous activities . For example, you could ask participants to contribute ideas to a shared document such as a prestructured Trello board or Google Sheets document over an assigned period of time, and then meet remotely to discuss or rank generated ideas .
• Enable mutual participation: Open, free-for-all discussion in virtual meetings is challenging. Some participants might get lost behind the screen, and others might take over the conversation. Think of ways to structure discussion with activities that require participation by everyone in the session (e.g., giving participants contribution quotas for idea generation).
• Respect schedules: If team members are geographically distributed, be respectful of time zones and schedules. Using a meeting poll tool such as Doodle that automatically personalizes time zones and allows individuals to specify when they are available can take some of the operational headache out of finding a time that works for everyone.
• Keep tools simple: More often than not, you don’t need anything new or complex to collaborate remotely. Think creatively about how you can make use of tools within the team’s existing toolkit that everyone is familiar with. Using columns in Google Sheets for affinity diagramming , for example, might be less intimidating for teams than learning a new virtual whiteboarding tool.

Tools for Remote Collaboration and Brainstorming

• Synchronous, remote collaboration: For teams seeking a shared virtual space, the options are vast. Any shared Google document (e.g., Sheets, Slides, Drawings) can act as a virtual “room,” as can virtual whiteboarding tools such as MURAL or Miro.
• Asynchronous, remote collaboration: Make use of tools that allow team members to freely post ideas as they think of them, while still providing some level of structure and organization, such as a dedicated Slack channel or Trello board. 

NN/g Articles About Remote Collaboration and Brainstorming

We’ve previously shared guidelines for both synchronous and asynchronous, remote ideation, as well as our own experience collaborating as a 100%-remote company:

• Remote Ideation: Synchronous and Asynchronous (also: video )
• Remote UX Work: The NN/g Case Study

Because NN/g is a 100%-remote company , we use digital tools frequently for all kinds of virtual UX work. Here are some of our own internal strategies for planning and conducting remote UX activities.

• Practice, practice, practice: Did I mention practice? Get familiar with the technology before logging in to present your research recommendations or lead a remote brainstorming session. Even if you are familiar with the tool you’ll be using, host a practice session with team members or friends to run through the features you plan on using. At NN/g, we sign up for practice sessions with colleagues in order to familiarize ourselves with new digital-tool features, such as the video breakout rooms in Zoom.
• Carefully consider tools: While MURAL or Miro are excellent tools for mapping activities and general collaboration that we as designers or researchers may already be familiar with, other colleagues might find them intimidating or view them as a “design-team tool.” Think creatively: Content for journey maps or service blueprints can be captured in a shared Google Sheets template. Activities that rely heavily on sticky notes such as postups and affinity diagraming can be completed with free digital tools such as stickies.io or even Google Drawings.
• Keep it simple: Tools should be few and familiar if you are transitioning traditionally physical activities to a digital format. Don’t plan on having participants switch back and forth between several tools. (There’s already enough complexity to manage.) And eliminate potential technical headaches by using technology that does not have tons of features that you won’t use anyway.
• Stick to the known: The general advice for any tool selection is always: use the tools your team already knows, to avoid wasting time on the inevitable snafus when using something new. However, this rule is most important when working on time-critical or super-important projects. From time to time, when your people are less stressed, it’s nice to try out some of the many new tools that constantly appear.
• Ask for help: Solicit technical assistance, especially if you will be leading a complex remote workshop or conducting a remote UX-research session for the first time. A colleague serving as a technical assistant during the session can manage questions about the technology, help make observations about where and how to improve digital activities, and take part in retrospectives with the facilitator so that delivery can continue to improve over time.

Planning remote UX activities can feel ambitious and demanding, but careful tool selection, contingency planning, and proactive measures help mitigate potential oversights and challenges. And, in many cases, the benefits of remote UX work, such as decreased expenses, increased inclusiveness and convenience, and abundance of platform options, might even outweigh those additional challenges. Even if it’s not a necessity for your team, consider when remote user research, virtual UX workshops, and remote collaboration and brainstorming might introduce added value to your projects and workflow.

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How to Conduct User Research Remotely: 5 Innovative Methods

Nobody can nail it the first time when putting together a user interface, whether it’s on a mobile app or a website. Extensive research is needed to test UX quality and make sure your tools and features are easy to use and satisfy your users needs. Unfortunately, hiring a bunch of people to sit down in a room and share their experiences using your product might not be feasible.

Enter remote user research.

Can you do Remote User Research?

There are plenty of ways  UX designers  can remotely gather intel on how consumers use their products; there are quite a few  remote user research tools  out there. And many of these methods will give more valuable insights than an in-person focus group, as customers are actually using the product the way they would in their natural habitat. 

If you’re wondering, “Can you do remote user research?” The short answer is yes — and here are just a few of the ways you can engage with your customers to improve your UX design.

1. Online Survey

There are a number of ways to deploy an online survey for remote user research, whether it’s via mobile app, web portal, or email. Because this takes a little bit of time for your users (and you need a big enough sample size), it’s important to either make these short and sweet – or even fun if possible – or incentivize your users with some kind of reward. 

2. Behavioral Analytics

This is a great companion to online surveys since users aren’t always completely aware of how they use your products. A lot of user behavior is instinctual. Behavioral analytics can track how, how often, and when users are engaging with resources to get a quantitative understanding of what’s working and what isn’t.

3. Tree Testing

In the  tree testing  method, which is mainly for website and application UX research, users are given a text version of your website and asked to complete tasks to see how intuitive your navigation is.

4. Diary Study

This remote user research method is only for those users who are all-in for your company, either because they are partners or because you’ve offered some pretty great incentives. Over a long period of time, users keep a diary of how they use your resources and jot down any reactions they have. This gives you subjective data that can’t really be gathered through more automated methods, like analytics or a short survey.

5. A/B Testing

Having a couple of UX options in your testing can help you not only see what is or isn’t working, but also see what might work better. With a large enough sample size for your testing, you can see which version of an application or website performs better and why.

Bottom Line: You Need an Effective User Research Strategy

To do effective testing of how well your UX stacks up, you need a well thought out  remote user research strategy . Who are your target customers? How do your products or services fill their needs? If you’re a B2B provider, who are the specific personas you need to get in front of? 

With an experienced UX design company helping you ask the right questions, you’re much more likely to get the most useful answers.  Get in touch  with Big Human.

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Development

Android Tablet Development 101: Everything You Need to Know

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Remote Research Methods

What are remote research methods.

Remote research methods are ways that researchers can gather data at a distance on users. Common methods for gathering data remotely include online surveys, keeping a diary, automatic logging through recording, behavioral analytics and experience sampling methods.

Many researchers believe that these user research methods are perhaps the best way to gauge the effectiveness of user-experience products while simultaneously remaining budget-friendly.

Literature on Remote Research Methods

Here’s the entire UX literature on Remote Research Methods by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Remote Research Methods

Take a deep dive into Remote Research Methods with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

All open-source articles on Remote Research Methods

Unmoderated remote usability testing (urut) - every step you take, we won’t be watching you.

• 3 years ago

User Research Methods for Mobile UX

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Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Design to learn about core concepts of UX design.

In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

The User Research and Insights Tool for Design and Product Teams

30 of the Best UX Research Tools for Remote Teams

User research can easily become overwhelming for new researchers who are still learning the ropes. It’s easy to feel confused when you think of where to recruit research participants, which type of UX research method to apply, or choosing a tool to use at each stage of the UX research process .

Remote collaboration is easier with the right tools. Rather than wasting time on manual activities that won’t generate data-backed responses, UX research tools save time and ensure you’re getting feedback from your ideal audience.

In this guide, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of UX research tools to:

• Recruit research participants and conduct user interviews
• Analyze research findings and build user research repositories
• Collect product feedback
• Conduct remote usability testing
• Understand user behavior on your website or app
• A/B test specific elements for conversion
• Collect web analytics
• Conduct surveys
• Schedule and host remote meetings with research respondents

What is UX Research? 

UX research is the systematic study of target users to collect and analyze data that inform product design. The goal of UX research is to understand the behavior, needs, wants, and desires of a target audience. 

UX researchers use various research methods to uncover problems and reveal insight that feeds the design process. The two main parts of UX research are gathering data and synthesizing data to improve usability.

Rather than making assumptions, you’re empowered to give your users the best solution because you know what they need.

30 of the Best UX Research Tools to Explore

Ux research recruiting.

Great Question

Great Question is a user research tool that helps research and product teams to build a panel of customers to survey, interview, and collect feedback on a prototype. If you have a user base of customers, you can import your data into Great Question. You can schedule interviews, batch invitations and manage incentives for research participants.

They offer AI-powered features to help you distill and share your findings with stakeholders via email or Slack.

Ethnio is a participant management platform for UX research. With Ethnio, product teams and researchers can integrate studies directly into their native apps and website. When users are browsing your site or app, they’ll either get an invite to participate in a research project or fill out a small survey. You can schedule meetings, pay incentives and track research activity in Ethnio.

Rather than trying to recruit participants who may not be a good fit, use live intercepts to recruit from people who already know and love your product. Ethnio’s pricing starts at $66 per month for 1 team member and $149 per month for three team members.

User Interviews

User Interviews is a UX research recruiting platform with an audience of over 500,000 vetted panelists. If you reward research participants, they can manage incentives for you. Other features include scheduling user interviews, screener surveys, and participation tracking. If you already have a list of research participants, User Interview can store and manage your participants. 

User Interviews pre-screens each user to ensure they’re real humans from your demographic using filters such as location, income, age, and gender. Pricing starts at $45 per session on the Pay As You Go Plan and $175 per month for the Starter plan.

Userbrain is a user testing software with over 65,000 user testers. It allows you to see how users interact with your website. They provide a regular flow of first-time testers who complete a list of tasks on your website with live commentary so you know what they’re thinking as they complete each task. 

There is no video of the participant’s face. Instead, Userbrain shows the participant’s screen and records audio as they interact with your website. Pricing starts at $35 on the pay-as-you-go plan. The subscribe & save plan costs $230 per month and includes 10 Userbrain testers.

UX Research Repository Tools

Brief History of Aurelius

Zack Naylor was fascinated with user research from a young age. He taught himself user research and learned everything he could about UX and building human-centered product designs. Later in his career, he moved to Minneapolis for a job and that’s where he met his business partner, Joseph Szczesniak . Together they created Aurelius in Zack’s basement. Cliché, but it’s true!

They wanted to build a software that would help researchers , UX designers, and product teams to make better product decisions without sorting through hours of research data manually.

Aurelius started as a product strategy platform in 2015. But Zack and Joseph agreed that the product could be doing more to solve the problem of research analysis. In 2017, they launched an optional beta version focused on research analysis and repository. 

Soon, more people were using the beta version than the product strategy software they were paying for. It was the validation that Zack and Joseph needed to fully pivot to the Aurelius research insight platform you know today.

It’s interesting to note that Zack and Joseph have been careful to keep Aurelius mostly self-funded. Aurelius recently got accepted into the TinySeed accelerator program . While Aurelius received some seed investment from TinySeed, Zack and Joseph retain full control of the product direction. They’ve seen how venture funding changes a product’s priority and they want to stay true to providing a research repository software that works.

How is Aurelius Different from Other User Research Repository Tools?

Here are a few stand-out features of Aurelius

Magic Upload

Use Magic Upload to turn a variety of research data into text. Examples of formats you can upload include videos, audio, transcription, diary notes, spreadsheets, and more.

Keyword Analysis

Find out which words and phrases your research participants use the most with the Keyword Analysis feature. You can use patterns in data sets to get Insights.

Cross Project Insights

If you’re working on multiple research projects at the same time, use the Cross Project Insights to synthesize a higher volume of data, jump across numerous Projects and get Insights that help you make better products.

Cross Project Recommendation

If you’ve worked on a project in the past that’s related to a current Project, use the Cross Project Recommendation to harness your research findings and capture suggestions and ideas from multiple Projects.

Use Collection to create a custom group of Key Insights and Recommendations from past Projects and add it to your current Project. It’s a great way to leverage past research for answers to questions. Aurelius also lets you share your Collections with collaborators whether they have an Aurelius account or not.

Unlimited Storage and Unlimited Projects

While most research repository tools limit storage, the number of users, and projects, Aurelius empowers you to do more. Each Aurelius plan includes Unlimited Users, Unlimited Storage, and Unlimited Projects. You never have to worry about running out of space or losing your research data.

Aurelius pricing starts at $49 per month for the Professional plan (ideal for solo researchers) and $199 per month for the Premium plan (ideal for in-house research and product teams).

Dovetail is a research repository software that stores qualitative research in one place. Use Dovetail to upload videos, photos, notes, or other data from your research. Dovetail also allows product managers , UX designers, and researchers to analyze qualitative data, find insights and share research findings with stakeholders.

However, Dovetail repository pricing starts at $100 per month for five users which is expensive when compared to the Aurelius starter plan that costs $49 per month and includes unlimited users.

Formerly known as NomNom, EnjoyHQ is a product research management tool that integrates research data, customer feedback, app reviews, and data from other sources. Features include reports, highlighting, and tagging. Use EnjoyHQ to organize and share research data or customer insight in one place.

Airtable is a cloud collaboration service that works as a smart spreadsheet where your team can collaborate on projects. It has the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. User researchers can create databases, add records, set up column types, sort records and publish views to external websites.

While Airtable accommodates a wide range of research projects, it’s ideal for researchers who want to create their database and maintain complete control on how they import, use and synthesize data. 

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Atlassian confluence provides a shared workspace where researchers can add projects, invite teammates and organize tasks in a hierarchical structure.

Confluence keeps your team organized with everything from strategy docs to meeting notes and IT documentation to help you make more informed design decisions. It also allows researchers to create discoverable documents that collaborators can access. 

Product Feedback Tools

Productboard 

Productboard is a product management platform that helps product teams to get their products to market faster. They make it easy for product managers to collect feedback from platforms like Slack, Salesforce, Intercom, emails, and more. 

The platform organizes your insight, codes them into themes, and attaches your insight to the user’s needs and product ideas. 

Uservoice is a product feedback management software that helps product teams to gather, aggregate, and analyze feedback from internal teams and customers. The core function is to provide user feedback and insight for product teams to build better products. 

Uservoice is great for SaaS companies that want to collect feedback traditionally and allow users to vote on product features they love or hate. The feedback combines both qualitative and quantitative data so you can prioritize your product roadmap with responses from multiple sources.

Usabilia is a product feedback tool that uses quick emoji surveys to gather contextual feedback and optimize your digital products.

Usabilia uses an emotional trend line to display user reactions and show how users feel about your product over time. You can follow up with questions to gather more insight.

The feedback item includes a screenshot and page metadata such as screen resolution and type of device to give you a better understanding of your user’s experience. 

Usability Testing Software

TryMyUI is a remote usability testing tool that shows you video recordings of real people using your website. You can test prototypes and wireframes in remote usability studies. 

TryMyUI works with mobile apps and websites and even includes options for impression testing and written surveys. Other features of TryMyUI include demographic curation, screener testing, UX diagnostics, and analytics.

Pricing on TryMyUI starts at $99 per month on the personal plan for single users and $399 per month for teams.

dscout  

dscout is a remote user research tool that helps remote teams to collect in-context insight from people who use your product. They boast an engaged pool of over 100,000 panelists. It’s a great place to recruit participants for diary studies and one-on-one user interviews. 

For diary studies, you create missions for research participants to complete. Their response includes videos, pictures, and notes about their experience. For remote interviews, they offer inbuilt video conferencing capabilities that include live-notation, auto-transcribe, and screen sharing.

Userlytics is a remote user testing platform that allows you to test your mobile apps, websites, and prototypes. Test competitor assets to see what’s working for them and adapt it to your customer journey to improve user experience .

Userlytics allows UI/UX designers to create user testing scripts and send them to participants who complete the test as part of an unmoderated study. You can also download or share the videos with other project collaborators. 

Researchers can create screener questions that disqualify candidates from the study and establish rules for deeper segmentation that leads to more accurate results.

Maze is a remote usability testing platform that turns your prototype into actionable insight from users. You can run usability tests and share a link with testers to get actionable insights quickly. Maze integrates with Marvel, Figma, Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch so you can import an existing prototype.

It’s great for hiring test participants, task-based usability testing, unmoderated testing, collecting metrics, and turning feedback into reports. Top features of Maze include heatmaps, multiple path analysis, task analysis, and guerilla testing.

Maze offers a free plan for single users with 3 active projects. Maze paid plan starts at $25 per month for 10 active projects.

Userzoom is a UX research platform with managed research options.  It is ideal for enterprise clients and experienced UX researchers who can take advantage of its advanced offerings. Features include moderated and unmoderated usability testing, analytics, surveys, benchmarking, reporting, user recruitment, and more. 

You can find research participants from a database of over 120 million participants. Userzoom is great for teams that want to manage research projects but works best for companies that want to outsource the entire research project in return for actionable insights.

Heat Mapping Tools

Hotjar is a website heatmap and behavior analytics tool. Watch how visitors and users navigate your site to better understand what they need and how they feel. Use the analytics to optimize your website and improve conversion. 

Heatmap is the best feature on Hotjar. It allows you to visualize user behavior through a representation of user scrolling behavior, clicks, and taps. You also view which part of your site has the most friction for new users. UX designers can use the feedback poll to ask questions and receive feedback from specific visitors on your website.

Mouseflow is a heatmap tool that captures user behavior on your website to identify friction points and show you why visitors aren’t converting. Apart from heatmaps, Mouseflow also offers session replay, form analytics, conversion funnels, and feedback campaigns.

Mouseflow pricing starts at $24 per month for the Starter plan, $79 per month for the Growth plan, and $159 per month for the Business plan.

Crazy Egg is a remote usability testing tool that’s known for heat mapping, A/B testing, and website optimization. View attention hotspots on product pages. See if your visitors are clicking where you want them to, and identify navigation obstacles that hinder conversion. 

CrazyEgg offers deep filtering options that allow you to dig deeper into audience segments and identify your most valuable visitors.

Use the A/B testing tool to determine if you’ve implemented the best solution. Select an element to test ideas on and experiment with features like headlines, product copy and sales copy to see what converts best.

CrazyEgg pricing starts at $24 per month for the Basic plan, $49 per month for the Standard plan, and $99 per month for the Plus plan.

A/B Testing Tools

Optimizely is a user testing tool that helps researchers to create advanced A/B tests with multiple variables. It offers deeper insights on user behavior that allows product and design teams to experiment with algorithms, design choices, and other elements that lead to great UX journeys.

Remote product teams can test micro-services, APIs, and architecture design to improve product performance. Experiment with algorithms like promotions, recommendations, and search results to deliver relevant content to your audience.

Just like its name, Visual Website Optimizer helps you optimize your website for user experience without relying on IT support or coding skills. VWO combines the power of its analytics software with A/B testing.

Build and launch A/B testing campaigns quickly within VWO. Researchers also use VWO to collect feedback from real users, segment reports, review heatmaps, and send personalized content to targeted audience members.

Website Analytics Tool

Woopra is a customer journey and product analytics software that automatically builds detailed customer profiles in real-time. Woopra helps product, sales, marketing, and support teams to optimize the customer lifecycle by delivering live behavioral data from various touchpoints such as mobile app, your company website, email, and help desk.

Researchers can use the analytics to pinpoint drop off points before conversion and optimize web pages. Woopra is free for small businesses with 30,000 actions per month, paid plans start at $79.95 per month for up to 40,000 subscriptions.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool for understanding user behavior on your site and gathering analytics such as conversion, acquisitions, and real-time use. Other analytics in the free version of Google analytics include bounce rate, pages per session, ad performance, and session length.

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is an advanced product and marketing analytics software. They combine email campaign automation with powerful analytics. To properly monitor user interactions, segment your key populations and use these populations to create targeted email campaigns based on actions users take on your site.

Kissmetrics pricing starts at $299 per month for the silver plan with 10k tracked users and $499 per month for the Gold plan with 25k tracked users.

Survey Tools

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is an online survey tool. It allows researchers and product teams to create and send out surveys. On the paid plans, you can create advanced surveys targeted at specific users. Then, turn analytic data into insight that improves your product UX.

The free version of SurveyMonkey includes 100 surveys per month maxed at 10 questions. Survey Monkey paid plans starts at $25 per month for three users on the Team Advantage plan and $75 per month for the Team Premier plan. 

Google Forms

Google Forms is a free survey software that allows researchers to create and administer online surveys. You can automatically integrate Google Forms with Google Spreadsheets to easily view results and sort through data. Google Forms also allows you to collaborate with your teammates on your Google Suite workspace.

Scheduling and Video Conferencing Tools

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling software that allows researchers to schedule meetings with research participants. Send your meeting link to a respondent and they pick an available time that fits their schedule. After they’ve booked a meeting, Calendly automatically creates a calendar event and shares the meeting details with you and your participant.

According to the State of User Research , 26% of respondents use Calendly to schedule research participants from their customer base while 14% use Calendly to schedule research participants from external sources.

The free Calendly plan includes one Calendar connection per user. Paid Calendly plans start at $8 per month for the Premium plan with two calendar connections and $12 per month for the Pro plan with six calendar connections.

Zoom is a video conferencing tool. It is great for user interviews, remote focus groups, and observing user behavior. Zoom supports chat, screen sharing, live transcription, and recording. They also support calendar integration with Calendly and other scheduling tools.

The free plan hosts up to 100 participants and is capped at 40 minutes. Paid plans start at $14.99 per month for the Pro plan and $19.99 per month for the Business plan. 

Build User-Friendly Products with the Right UX Research Tools

As you can see from this exhaustive list, there are many UX research tools in the market to choose from.  Hopefully, this list will help you recruit research participants, conduct user interviews, analyze research data, test prototypes and manage research projects more efficiently.

• If you’d like to learn more about UX research, this comprehensive guide explains how to conduct UX research
• Find out how to choose a UX research method for your next research project

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What is UX Research: The Ultimate Guide for UX Researchers

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Meet the 19 top-rated UX research tools & software for 2024

Building your UX research tool stack is an essential step in establishing an effective research practice. Read on for a round up of essential tools that will help you conduct UX research and move the needle in your organization.

What tools do UX researchers use?

UX researchers use a wide variety of tools to conduct user experience research . These tools have unique functions—each of which helps conduct different research and uncover insightful data.

Here’s a look at some of the tools that UX researchers use to get the insights they need to improve UX:

• Tools for user and usability testing : These tools help UX researchers evaluate how easy to use their products and features are
• Tools for user interviews: These tools help conduct live interviews to get direct feedback from users
• Tools for recruiting research participants: These tools help find participants for user research interviews
• Tools for testing information architecture: These tools help evaluate the layout of your website and how users expect your navigation to work
• Tools for product analytics: These tools provide data on how users interact with your website
• Tools for user surveys and feedback: These tools enable you to create surveys that collect feedback and insights from users

We’ve hand-picked a number of the best UX research tools for each of these categories to help you improve your UX research processes and workflows. Take a look at this overview before we take a closer look at each.

Tools for usability testing

UX research tools do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to user research. From recruiting participants and planning the interviews to getting feedback, and sharing your findings, having a great tool stack is important for running a great research practice .

Selecting the right UX research toolkit depends on where you are in the research process, the research method you’ll be using, the size of your organization, and the type of product you’re researching. Ready to get hands-on with research? Here are some tools to consider.

Maze is a continuous product discovery platform that empowers product teams to collect and consume user insights, continuously. With solutions for participant recruitment, product research, and reporting, Maze helps teams build the habit of continuous product discovery in a platform that enables everyone to run great research.

Maze integrates directly with Adobe XD, Figma, InVision, Marvel, and Sketch, and allows you to import an existing prototype from the design tool you use.

You can create and run in-depth usability tests at any stage of your research plan , to get actionable insights in minutes. Its usability testing solution includes task analysis, multiple path analysis, heatmaps, A/B testing, guerrilla testing, and more.

Maze allows you to run surveys and collect user feedback early in the design process, and also enables you to test your information architecture with features such as Card Sorts and Tree Tests.

Maze's reporting functionality automatically records and documents completion rates, misclick rates, time spent, click heatmaps, and more. Maze also generates a usability test report instantly for each test, that you can share with anyone with a link.

Key features: Integrations with leading design platforms, remote testing, surveys, IA testing, real-time reports, question repository , collaboration features, pre-built templates Pricing: Free for one project and five seats per month, then from $99 per month

Collect UX research insights at scale

Optimize your user experience with actionable insights from card sorting, tree testing, prototype testing, usability testing, and more.

Loop11 helps you conduct moderated and unmoderated usability testing on live websites, prototypes, and competitors’ websites, among others. With Loop11, you can start testing at the wireframing and prototyping stage to ensure your designs are headed in the right direction.

Beyond usability testing, Loop11 can help user researchers conduct competitive benchmarking , A/B testing, and IA testing.

Key features: Online usability testing, prototype testing, benchmarking, A/B testing, IA testing Pricing: From $63 per month

3. Userlytics

Userlytics is a user testing platform that helps you conduct research at scale by testing digital assets like websites, applications, mobile apps, prototypes, etc. You can collect both qualitative and quantitative data and set up advanced metrics and graphical reports.

With Userlytics, you can run any combination of moderated or unmoderated user experience studies, usability tests, card sorting, and tree testing using a diversity of features.

Key features: Usability testing, user experience studies, prototype testing, live conversations, card sorting, tree testing Pricing: From $49 per month

4. UsabilityHub

UsabilityHub is a remote research platform that offers a range of testing tools, including first click testing, design surveys, preference tests, and five-second tests. These tests enable you to collect data and validate design decisions.

With UsabilityHub’s Panel, researchers can recruit test users from a pool of participants based on criteria such as age, gender, education, and more to get feedback from a relevant target audience.

Key features: Remote user testing, first-click testing, design surveys, preference tests, five-second tests, participant recruitment Pricing: From $79 per month

💡 Want more? Check out our full list of usability testing tools here .

Tools for user interviews

5. lookback.

Lookback is a comprehensive user research tool that offers you the ability to do live user interviews contextualized through a live recording of the user’s screen. Lookback helps you conduct moderated, unmoderated, and remote research and includes a collaborative dashboard that lets you sync all your research and customer feedback and share it with your team.

Lookback sessions are recorded automatically, so you can rewatch them at your convenience and create highlight clips to share with colleagues and stakeholders. Among other things, the team plan allows you to do remote or in-person research, test with prototypes and invite observers to see in real-time.

Key features: Remote user research in real-time, moderated and unmoderated testing, collaborative dashboard, live note-taking Pricing: From $99 per month

6. Userzoom

Userzoom is a UX research platform for remote usability testing and includes features such as participant recruiting, heatmap and analytics recording, etc. You can use it to collect quantitative or qualitative feedback and create A/B tests with mock-ups to get feedback from users before product development.

With Userzoom, you can run unmoderated task-based studies with test participants from all around the world on a website, prototype, wireframe, or mock-up.

Key features: Usability testing, interviews, surveys, intercept testing, click testing, tree testing, card sorting, participant recruiting Pricing: Available upon request

dscout is a remote qualitative research platform that helps you collect in-context insights from the people who use your products. One component of the platform is dscout Live, which lets you run remote user interviews and collect feedback from participants. You can also run diary studies with dscout Diary to see people’s everyday product experience as it happens either on video or in photos. And with dscout Recruit, you can recruit research participants without the hassle and cost associated with traditional recruiting.

dscout is also helpful because it streamlines the most time-consuming parts of interviews with research-centric features such as participant scheduling, automatic transcriptions, on-call observers, and an interactive timeline for taking notes and clips.

Key features: Unmoderated research, remote user interviews, participant recruiting, automatic transcriptions, on-call observers, interactive timeline for taking notes Pricing: Available upon request

Tools for recruiting research participants

8. user interviews.

User Interviews is a well-known platform that helps you make better product decisions with seamless access to quality participants. The platform is known for allowing you to build your own pool of participants or access their panel of over 350,000 vetted research participants who can be filtered by profession.

User Interviews offers features like screener surveys, scheduling interviews, and participation tracking for your existing users. The median turnaround time is 2 hours, though it can vary based on the project.

Key features: Participant recruitment, screener surveys, scheduling interviews, messaging participants, automatic incentives, participation tracking Pricing: From $40 per session or $250 per month

Another user research tool for selecting participants is Ethnio, which enables you to create screeners for intercepting people on your website or app so that you can find the right participants for user research. Ethnio provides various filters for screeners and automated scheduling options that help streamline the process of getting in touch with users.

Within the platform, Ethnio also includes a tool called Research Incentives, a calculator that helps you reward your participants by instantly paying them using different online services.

Key features: Participant recruitment, central participant database, incentives, screeners, intercepts, scheduling options Pricing: From $79 per month

Ribbon is an all-in-one participant recruitment and screening tool that allows you to find users, screen them, and automatically schedule user interviews.

If you’re looking for a simple does-what-it-says recruitment tool, then Ribbon’s a great choice. They’re also currently working on features including interview transcripts and participant incentives.

Key features: Participant recruitment, screeners, automatic interview scheduling, incentive management, moderated interviews Pricing: From $79 per month

Tools for information architecture testing

11. optimal workshop.

Optimal Workshop offers a suite of testing tools to help you conduct information architecture (IA) tests. For card sorting, you can use their OptimalSort tool to understand how people think your content should be organized and categorized.

Another component of Optimal Work is Treejack, which helps you conduct unmoderated tree tests to identify if users are currently getting lost on your site and where they expect to find key information.

Key features: Card sorting, tree testing, first-click testing, IA testing, online surveys, qualitative research, participant recruitment Pricing: From $99 per month

12. kardSort

kardSort is an online card sorting tool which offers moderated, unmoderated, and hybrid card sorting.

As user-friendly as they come, kardSort operates in a simple drag-and-drop function which makes card sorting easy for researchers and participants alike.

Working on all browsers, you can set up and run a card sorting session incredibly quickly, and it’s ideal for asynchronous sessions due to its simplicity and ability to add pre or post-study questions.

Key features: Moderated, unmoderated and hybrid card sorting, pre and post-study interviews, tool tips Pricing: Free

UXarmy provides a variety of user testing solutions to help you run information architecture testing via tree tests and card sorting. You can create tests on the platform, or import existing ones.

The platform makes evaluating your layout easy, and in-depth analytics help you uncover insights from tests—including participant analysis, path analysis, and destination matrixes. It’s quick and easy to get started, and provides an intuitive process for your participants.

Key features: Card sorting, tree testing, moderated and unmoderated usability testing Pricing: All solutions are stand-alone, with card sorting costing $79 per month and tree testing $99 per month

Tools for product analytics

Hotjar is a remote research tool which allows you to view real-time user behavior via heatmaps and screen recordings.

With a huge amount of data available, plus in-app surveys, Hotjar is a great solution if you’re looking to focus on heatmapping as a research method and want to really understand the nuance of user behavior.

Key features: Heatmaps, screen recordings, unmoderated research, in-product feedback widgets and follow-up surveys Pricing: Free for 35 sessions, then from $39 per month

15. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is an event analytics platform that helps you track user behavior across your site. By giving you information about how customers interact with your product, Kissmetrics helps you acquire qualified prospects, convert trials to customers, and reduce churn.

It gives you tools to gain insights into how users interact with your product—especially if your primary focus is revenue.

Key features: Custom event tracking, entry and exit pages, on-page engagement, custom reports dashboards, segmentation, session analytics, and funnels Pricing: Billed per event ($0.0025/event) or build your own plan (starting at $25.99 per month for 10k events)

15. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is an events analytics tool that lets you see every moment of the customer experience. It lets you splice and dice data to uncover trends and find the root of the problem.

It’s a great tool for getting insights the whole team can understand and use, with collaborative notes, goals, and boards. With an easy learning curve, it’s a fast tool to pick up and get started with.

Key features: Customizable dashboards, anomaly explanations, filters, event tracking, demographic breakdowns, user journey analysis Pricing: Free plan with limited features and paid plans starting from $20 per month

Tools for user surveys and feedback

17. surveymonkey.

SurveyMonkey is a popular survey tool that helps you collect customer feedback via online questionnaires. It’s easy to use and easily customizable—from the in-survey branding and background to the font and URL.

SurveyMonkey’s AI feature—SurveyMonkey Genius—provides guidance and support to help you create optimized surveys. It’s a quick and easy tool for making surveys that get the insights you need.

Key features: Fully-customizable online surveys, market research solutions, Genius AI solution, online form embedding Pricing: Free plan with basic features, team plans start at $25 per user/month

18. Typeform

Typerform is another online survey builder that helps you build forms which stand out and collect the information you need.

Typeform integrates with your existing workflow to help streamline the customer feedback collection process, and provides a smooth, effortless experience for the users you’re surveying—ideal when UX is crucial and you don’t want a clunky experience to get in the way of authentic insights.

Key features: Simple form builder, branded forms, key integrations, varied question formats Pricing: Typeform starts at $25 per month for one user and 100 responses per month

19. Jotform

Jotform is an online form builder that provides templates for you to use in your customer feedback process. It shares many key features with the other survey tools on our list, but also offers a number of other solutions—like a no-code app builder and online storefront builder.

It’s an intuitive platform that helps you create branded surveys in minutes, making it a great all-in-one platform if you’re limited on budget.

Key features: Intuitive form builder, ample integrations, report generations, workflow automation Pricing: Free plan with survey limits, paid plans from $34 per month

Bonus tools to help with UX research

Alongside the dedicated user research tools, there are also a number of other tools that will help improve your user research process. Here’s the honorable mentions from our list to add to your tool stack.

For documenting research: Dovetail, Notion, Evernote, Miro For transcriptions: Otter.ai, Rev, Reduct For remote user testing: Zoom, Google Meet, Slack

How to select the best UX research tool

As you can see, there are lots of UX research tools to choose from. Your primary considerations when selecting a tool is the type of research you’re looking to conduct, but there are a number of other things to keep in mind:

• Ease of use and interface: Is the tool easy to use? Can you pick it up and get started straight away?
• Scalability: Can the tool grow with your research needs? Does it require technical help for scaling up, or can you scale rapidly?
• Support available: Is anyone on hand to help you when you get stuck? Is there a dedicated help center to support your success?
• Free trial/account: Can you try before you buy? What can you get done with the free version of a tool?

Whatever your needs, there’s a UX research tool out there for you.

If your needs include concept and idea validation, wireframe and usability testing, moderated interview analysis, and more—give Maze a try.

Maze enables you to get user insights fast, helping you to make informed decisions that improve your product.

Accelerate and scale your UX research

Get the insights you need to build better user experiences, with Maze’s suite of user research solutions.

Frequently asked questions about UX research tools

Some common tools that UX researchers use include tools for usability testing, user interviews, surveys, card sorting, tree testing, and first-click testing. A UX research tool stack may also include solutions for recruiting participants, documenting research, and transcribing interviews. Other examples are analytics and heat-mapping tools and remote user testing tools .

What is user experience (UX) design?

User experience design is the process designers use to build products that provide great experiences to their users. UX design refers to feelings and emotions users experience when interacting with a product. It focuses on the user flow and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their desired goals.

What is a UX research tool?

A UX research tool is a piece of software, tool, or app that enables UX researchers to maximise their research effectiveness and gather insights. Popular research tools include survey, recruitment, and interview software.

How to establish a strategic UX research process

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How to do user research in remote world? Here’s an essential guide for you

If you are in the business of talking to customers frequently, you know that there is usually a big difference between what they say they want and what they actually need.

Many customers will tell you that they want a product that’s inexpensive when what they really need is a tool that justifies its return on investment (ROI). Other times, they might say they want a solution that comes with hands-on technical support when what they need is a fully automated software.

Understanding your users is not always straightforward. To appreciate your customer needs, you sometimes have to survey them through interviews or observe them in the wild—in their natural environment to pick up on important behavioral clues.

These are useful insights that will help you understand customers better, build your product or features in a way that meets or exceeds their expectations, or sometimes lead to a complete pivot.

In short, you need user research to unearth your customers’ pain points (or aspirations) and add value to their lives.

What is user research?

User research is a way for you to listen, observe and understand the way your users behave and perceive during their interactions with your product. User research allows you to build a deeper understanding of your users—their needs, motivations, how they are using your product, or how they expect to use it. It’s also about gathering customer data on how they respond to the product’s UI (user interface), UX (user experience), or other important touch points.

But data without a story is gibberish. For instance, gathering raw, unsynthesized data without any context can prove to be an expensive and useless way of doing user research. You will have to translate user research data into useful user stories to arrive at hypotheses, conclusions, or new ideas. You can either test these ideas or make compelling changes to your product to better serve your clients.

At my startup, @usefyi we have pivoted from a document search tool for everyone to a security product used by IT people. We've also changed our name to Nira ( @niradotcom ). The pivot got kick-started when someone used our product in an unexpected way. Here's the story… — Hiten Shah (@hnshah) June 1, 2021

User research should be an integral part of your growth plan. You can lean into insights gathered from sales calls, customer success conversations, demos, stakeholder meetings and more, that can help you refine your product roadmap and strategy. It’s a continuous process.

Conducting research in today's remote set up

We're in a time where it is almost trite to talk about remote as the 'new normal.'  Many of us were actively using online meeting tools like Zoom and Google Meet for user interviews much before the impact of COVID-19 pandemic.

The key difference, however, is that back then most conversations happened in a hybrid fashion, i.e., a combination of online meetings and in-person meetings.

Trust and relationships were built over lunch meetings, dinners, happy hours, etc. Zoom and Google Meet helped keep the relationship going but was never completely relied upon as an end-to-end conversation platform.  

But now it’s all completely online and here’s the remote user research lifecycle looks like:

Step 1: Preparing for user research

Step 2: Asking the right questions during the meeting

Step 3: Documenting the key points

Step 4: Analyzing and finding common patterns across all customers/respondents

Step 5: Making a report

Step 6: Presenting to your product and engineering team

Step 7: Letting the product and engineering teams take things from there

Sounds obvious and straightforward, right? Not really.

Here’s the real problem when it comes to getting the remote user research executed well.

A lot of information is lost between the customer conversation and what reaches your product team as a set of recommendations. It could be due to lack of note taking, cognitive biases, differences in interpretation, and a lot more.

So, how do we solve this? Understanding the objectives of the user research is a good place to start ironing out the process.

Objectives of remote user research

The primary goal of user research is to achieve market-product fit. You want your products to be functional, useful, and fun to use for your customers, right? Conducting well-structured user research helps you achieve the following goals.

1. Build better products

By improving your chances of building good products or tweaking your existing products, user research enables you to reduce the probability of making bad assumptions about your customers’ expectations or their use cases. User research leads you to testable or actionable data that you can use to iterate your product development cycle, make changes to your roadmap, improve the UX and more.

Ultimately, user research guides you to build successful products that your customers will love to use instead of something that resembles the image below.

2. Get closer to customers

User research is an opportunity for product brands to place themselves in direct proximity with their existing or to-be customers. It’s a technique to create a direct feedback loop with customers instead of relying on guesswork to make your product more relevant.

3. Improve team alignment

The findings that emerge out of user research help you break organizational silos. When data takes on the mantle, it keeps all teams focused in the same direction and to achieve a single goal.

The user research data helps teams share values and norms that align with the overarching organizational goals. User research also encourages a culture of running experiments to make business decisions—instead of working on assumptions that vary by the individuals or teams.

4. Design high-value Mafia offers

All customer expectations boil down to two broad categories—customers either want to find pleasure or move away from pain. Here are a few examples of what customers really expect when they buy your product:

• “help me make more money”
• “save me time”
• “improve my status among my peers”
• “make work more fun for me”

Many times, user research leads you to discover bombshell truths about customers that can help you come up with a master value proposition. You can incorporate the data to create a highly desirable Mafia offer that your customers cannot refuse and your rivals can’t match quickly. Mafia offers help your sales team give a ready answer to your customers who ask—“why should I buy from you?”

And I’m sure you know that you need a clear answer to that question, and hopefully not “we’re priced better” :)

Here’s an example: 

When the U.S. economy was still recovering from the recession, car sales were down to a record low in 2009. Hyundai launched an Assurance Program promising the car buyers to buy back their car if they lost their jobs within the next two years. This irresistible offer led Hyundai to improve their sales by 4.9% in 2009—compared to the 40% drop in overall car sales in the U.S. in 2008.

As a brand, you can’t come up with that kind of high-value offer unless you talk to your users and understand their core problems.

5. Improve roadmaps and prioritize features

User research is preliminary data, which means sometimes the data that comes out of it is inconclusive. You have to treat user research like next-step data—test it, improve your product features, or come up with an entirely new set of offerings to validate (or invalidate) a hypothesis.

User research leads you to new discoveries about your customers and helps your product teams prioritize features on the roadmap based on what your customers see as immediate must-haves. 

Conducting effective user research

From picking up the phone to talk to your customers to embedding a built-in survey in your product dashboard, there are scores of methods to conduct user research. There is no standard answer to which research method is best for you—it should align with what you want to achieve out of the exercise.

For the scope of this post, we will focus on the four user research types that are most effective for SaaS companies. As a prerequisite to doing user research, always run a screener survey to qualify (or disqualify) respondents from taking your survey. Interviewing the wrong set of people will deviate you further away from your goal and north star metrics.

You also have to be careful to not incentivize your user research for the risk of drawing the wrong kind of crowd or inviting bias into your user research. Instead, you can use expert user recruiting firms like GLG AlphaGroup or use platforms like UserInterviews.com or Respondent.io to run effective user research at scale.

1. User surveys

User surveys make a lot of sense when you want to gather specific data from a large audience. User surveys are less expensive, easy to execute, and scalable. Most effective user surveys are short, focused on a singular topic, and have a good mix of quantitative methods and open-ended questions.

Typically, in user surveys, you prepare a list of questions to gather quantitative data to test a hypothesis. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS), or collecting analytical data from your product dashboard using tools like MixPanel or Amplitude are common examples.

On the other hand, you can conduct focus group interviews, moderated usability testing, and online polls for qualitative user surveys.

2. Jobs To Be Done interviews

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a framework to identify the one core job that your customers “hire” your product to do for them. In the context of user research, a job is a metaphorical representation of what a customer wants to accomplish through a product.

There are five steps to running an effective JTBD interview:

i. Select users who want to accomplish a job

ii. Identify the “job steps” they go through to finish a job

iii. Ask them who they want to hire for the job—and why

iv. Note down or record your JTBD interview data

v. Analyze and implement the data

For example, at Avoma, our JTBD interviews with Customer Success Managers from SaaS companies revealed that one of their primary problems that bothered them was “being unable to identify potential customer churn signals .”

And that’s how we identified that the ‘saved search’ feature in Avoma could be used as a potential churn indicator. All they had to do was set up alerts for potential churn indicating keywords or phrases from conversations—phrases such as “leadership change”, “inhouse initiative”, “change of direction”, etc.

While introducing the JTBD framework to the world, the late Clayton Christensen used an example of why commuters bought milkshakes instead of other snacks. Watch this four-minute video to understand why the JTBD framework is effective.

3. Problem interviews

Lean startup advocates Ash Maurya and Steve Blank recommend problem interviews as a way for product companies to discover the real problems customers have to arrive at breakthrough insights.

Problem interviews are useful in finding out the ideal customers for your product, the problems that your product can solve for them, and how they are solving them currently.

Here are the steps to effectively run a problem interview:

Step 1: Identify the right customer segment

Step 2: Frame the context (e.g., ask them to explain their problem)

Step 3: Ask them to rank and rate their problem(s)

Step 4: Identify which alternatives they were/are using to solve their problems

Step 5: Take note of the emotions when they are explaining their problem

Make sure you repeat the experiment with a decent sample size and ask “the five whys” questions to go deep into understanding the user problems.

4. Solution interviews

While solution interviews sound like the antithesis of problem interviews, that’s not the case. Solution interviews are actually complementary to problem interviews because both of them fall in the realm of the lean startup philosophy.

Like problem interviews, solution interviews are also ideal for early-stage startups that have an MVP (minimal viable product). That’s because solution interviews also follow the build>measure>learn>repeat cycle of the lean startup belief.

Here is how to carry out a solution interview:

Step 2: Prompt them to contextualize their problem

Step 3: Identify the alternatives they are using to solve their problems

Step 4: Demo your solution as a possible answer to their problem

Step 5: Ask them to rank the solution

Step 6: Find out what will make your solution a must-have for them

Step 7: Discuss pricing (e.g., “(How much will you for it?”)

Close by asking for follow-up, if required, and referrals in their network.

Here’s how a solution testing interview might look visually:

Preventing information loss from your user research

The last thing you want is all your efforts on user research going to waste. But unfortunately, in most situations, 

• A lot of key information is lost between the interview conversation and what gets documented (usually due to lack of uniformity in note taking)
• There’s no uniformity in terms of questions/points to be covered by the different interviewers
•  Inherent biases in interpreting customers’ answers

A simpler solution to this problem is to bring the entire process from scheduling meetings to creating a questionnaire to recording conversations to analysis within one conversation intelligence platform. A conversation intelligence software handles pretty much everything before, during and after the meeting including recording, transcribing, summarizing the conversation and providing conversational analytics.

Here’s how the process looks:

Step 1 : Create a library of questions to be covered 

Step 2: Record, transcribe and get summarized notes of your interviews within the same interface

Step 3: Identify patterns

Step 4: Share snippets of conversations with your product and engineering teams for better customer context

Step 5: Collaborate across functions by commenting and tagging stakeholders

Final words...

The more user research you conduct and iterate your product, the more relevant your product becomes to your customers. And at the organization level, you can be more confident of your product decisions. But ensure that you have the necessary process and tools in place to prevent loss of information throughout the process. Finally, let your product maturity guide the right time and frequency of conducting user research.

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