What if you could borrow someone’s eyes for some time? Okay, that wasn’t meant to be a joke; it was actually a pretty serious question. Let us put it this way – what if you could see what someone else saw on a website. And by see here we mean actually “seeing” the exact parts of a website’s display that caught a user’s eye during his visit. Wouldn’t it be just the thing a website owner needed?

An online marketer, web designer, or an online business owner always needs to know if his website is actually achieving its purpose – drawing customers in and driving sales. While there are various tools to track how much time a user spends on a web-page before going away, knowing exactly what the user “sees” on a page is rather difficult. Of course if the user ends up filling some form you’d know what he saw for sure, but if it was just another content filled website, finding out the exact points on your website that attracted the customer’s attention could give you valuable insights.

That’s exactly what the tool we’re discussing here does – show you what your customers actually see on your website. With RealEye, you can view your website through your customers’ eyes.

RealEye – Online eye tracking for websites

RealEye is a unique SaaS platform that lets you track your website visitors’ eye movements through webcam tracking. It records visual activity of visitors on websites (landing pages, posters, flyers, etc.) and returns results in the form of playable heat-maps of single and aggregated results. So when you view the results, you can know the exact spot of your website a user focused most on (since it will contain the most concentrated heat-map).

Eye-tracking brings great value to a project’s development lifecycle. You can run tests on your design and spot weaknesses like users not noticing CTA, slogan or branding even before you release the product. The tool is powered by advanced eye-tracking algorithms that allow you to track what people see within ~64px (the size of a button).

Here’s a quick glance at the tool’s features:

• Supports adding image files or website URLs for eye-tracking
• Lets you add up to 20 projects into a single analysis
• Enables you to get results from about 20 testers within 8 hours
• Allows you to invite your own testers with no additional fee
• Provides access to shareable dashboards with results presented on playable heat-map
• Very low error margin on visual angle of 4.17 degree

In a nutshell, RealEye lets you know whether your website’s CTA is being noticed or not!

How it works

The logic and working behind the tool is quite simple.

• You add projects (design images or URLs) to the tool’s online interface and run the analysis.
• The tool’s on-call testers then view your project data with eye-tracking on
• You get to see the results within a span of 8 hours.

Why 8 hours? Because RealEye uses real testers from its internal team to run eye-tracking analysis on your projects and they might or might not be available when you start the analysis. But you can be assured of receiving the results of your tests within a maximum period of 8 hours. That’s why the demo of the tool is called “instant demo” since don’t need to wait around for the results; you can see them within a few minutes (primarily because you play the part of the viewer).

A cool feature of the tool lets you invite your own testers and use them with eye-tracking instead of relying on RealEye’s testers. This aspect of the tool can be particularly helpful if the images or URLs that you need to test contain sensitive material.

Once you’re able to see the heat-maps, you can click and drag your mouse to highlight a particular area of the maps to see exactly how much time the tester spent looking at that area. This feature when performed on end users helps you identify the most attractive points of your design or URL and thus help you identify:

• The most important element on the page
• If you’re users are reading your content
• Visibility of elements below fold
• Distractions by useless elements

Highs & Lows

The plus points of the tool are obvious – its unique functionality and purpose. The motto behind the application’s development is to empower people to find out real plus and minus points about their design, and that’s exactly what RealEye allows you to do.

A major drawback (if you can call it that) of the tool is that there’s no trial version available for it. All you get to try the tool out is an “instant demo” that lasts a couple of minutes and lets you see the action. To test out the tool on any sample URL or image you’ll need to sign up.

• Track what your website visitors see with realeye.io/, webcam eye-tracking for web designers via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

RealEye lets you take control of things and its results are surprisingly accurate. The platform has helped many designers understand what their audience looks at and thus improve their work. It would be great if the tool had some sort of a trial version, however, even without it, there’s probably no reason why web designers shouldn’t be using it.

Modern products and services are all about excelling in the field of customer satisfaction. The organizations that have user experience, popularly known as UX, as their primary objective are the ones that have the highest chances of success as compared to others. That’s the reason modern day UX designers are some of the highest paid professionals in the technology field. But when the costs go high, the road gets steep for small organizations. What they need is killer UX design skills at a price they can afford. Enter – UXPin.

UXPin – Collaborative UX design tool

UXPin is an online tool that lets you and your team work collectively on wire-framing, prototyping, user testing and more without the need of writing code. It lets you create user flows, static / interactive designs, prototypes with advanced states, and interactive wire-frames within minutes and share them with your team in different formats (PDF, PNG, HTML, etc). Other team-mates can monitor the designs shared with them, leave their feedback in the form of comments and notify the people the comments are meant for. You can even get manager approvals for your UX designs directly through the tool. With its state-of-the-art features and easy working interface, UXPin is one tool that helps save teams hundreds of hours by simplifying product development and collaboration through elimination of coding.

Some of the most interesting features of UXPin include:

• Thousands of built-in elements for UX designing on mobile, web, and desktop
• Editor for building static / interactive designs and advanced prototypes with interactions
• Facility to import designs from Sketch and Photoshop
• Custom libraries to help you standardize your designs
• Auto-update that reflects changes you make to one element in all other elements of your design
• Lets you assign roles and permissions to team members
• Enables tracking project status in the dashboard
• Eliminates lengthy redlining of mockups with spec mode

UXPin can play a pivotal role in bringing distributed UX design teams together through its platform. With this one tool, people sitting across different continents can work together in real-time. It lets teams quickly test their UX designs across platforms and allows people to actually go into a design and cut and paste components where needed. It is a tool that lets you go beyond the traditional limits of designing.

Here’s how you can use UXPin

You can jump right into the action by starting with UXPin’s free trial. It is simple to register. All you have to do is enter your company email address where required and hit on the big blue button that says “Start using it now!” on the tool’s homepage. You could also let the experts at UXPin give you and your team a helpful demo. For now, let’s stick to the free trial.

Once you’ve entered your email id, the tool will ask you for a few more details before proceeding. It’s the usual process most tools follow to customize themselves to suit your needs better. Typically, the details you’d need to provide would include the size of your design team, information as to how you got to know about UXPin, and what role you play in your project. A short and sweet tour later, you will arrive at your dashboard.

In the dashboard you’ll see a dummy project, options to add new members or manage your team, options to upgrade, and most importantly, the option to create a new project. We suggest to start with new project creation as that will give you the most exposure to UXPin’s features. Click on “Create new project” and give it a name. Save and proceed.

The next screen will ask you to choose between using the UXPin editor to create designs from scratch or import them from Photoshop or Sketch. We chose to start from scratch and arrived at the handsome UXPin editor. The UXPin editor has a gray colored work area in the center of the screen with drag-and-droppable elements on the left. By default, the “Basic Elements” library is selected but you can change that through a convenient drop-down. You can create pages and layers in your design and name it whatever you wish to. The top margin of the work area is lined with more editing options, a play button that says “Preview”, and a button that lets you “Share” your prototype or wire-frame with your team.

When you’re done, click on the “More” button at the top right of the screen and then click on “Log out”.

Pluses VS Minuses

The pluses are many and can be easily gathered from the features section. The tool isn’t very costly either.

As far as the minuses are concerned, we think there are a few minor ones:

• The tool does have a slight learning curve associated with it. It might take some time for getting used to.
• A good catch suggested by one of the designers is the lack of an “Offline” mode in the tool. You’d always need to be connected to the Internet to work on UXPin.
• The tool could benefit from more design options like fonts and customizations.

• The tool #UX designers across the world are loving: @uxpin uxpin.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

Overall, UXPin is one tool no UX designer should miss. Despite the tiny drawbacks, it is awesomely useful owing to the advanced editor and integrated collaboration features.

Gone are the days when all that was needed to create an application was a little imagination, purpose and work. Today, the world has become more user-centric with more organizations and professionals realizing that if they want to build a successful business, they need to do it right; they need to keep user preferences in mind. It’s all about UX (user experience) these days. Be it a browser based app, a mobile app or a simple website for a product / service, extensive focus is laid on the intricacies of user expectations and perception. For any organization, hitting the bull’s eye means nailing customer satisfaction. That’s the reason organizations employ dedicated UX experts to create efficient and eye-catchy designs that stick in the customers’ minds.

But creating hard-hitting designs is just one aspect of the whole task. Once created and developed, such designs need to be evaluated for their effectiveness before getting them on the floor. And that is where design test suites find their place. In the spotlight today, a brilliant online suite of tests to assess designs – UsabilityHub.

UsabilityHub – Make confident design decisions

Designing is an area of product development that witnesses minor to major debates. Several viewpoints and suggestions come at loggerheads and finally one perfect (or seemingly so) design is finalized. But do teams and organizations ponder over the fact that the design that so appeals to them might not seem very interesting to a naïve user who doesn’t know so much about their product? To get over such and other complicated issues, test your designs with real data and simulated user responses to know how much water your designs hold. Enter UsabilityHub.

The UsablityHub suite of tests provides remote user testing for your websites or apps to help settle design debates with data. A variety of tricky yet simple experiments help you assess exactly what you want to know about your website’s impact on users. And the good part is, you can choose which users give you that feedback through a “recruit your own testers” link. The tests are in the form of surveys and differ with the kind of plan you subscribe for (free or pro). You can make a test for free and receive up to 20 responses from your own recruits with a free subscription. A Pro subscription entitles you to unlimited user responses.

UsabilityHub is a uniquely flexible tool that offers you the freedom to use it just the way you want to. You can receive responses from random or selected users that you pick by way of sharing the test links or you can order responses from UsabilityHub. “Ordering responses” means you pay a little to have UsabilityHub members (designers, UX experts, developers, students, marketers etc.) complete the tests. On average, you can expect to receive 50 responses within 20 – 30 hours.
There’s a lot more to this great suite of online tests so let’s take everything up one by one.

How it works

There are 5 types of tests that UsabilityHub offers:

• 5 second test – This test helps measure the clarity of your design by asking people what they can recall after viewing the design for only 5 seconds. This test is most apt for evaluating home page designs, landing pages, logos, brochures and marketing material that needs to be visually appealing in order to make a great first impression.
  To make this test, click on the “Know More” button under the test description on the main page and then click on “Make a 5 second test” on the next page (before proceeding to make the test you can take a sample test and view sample reports). You’ll be asked to sign-up and then you can upload images and decide what questions you wish to put in the test.
• Click Test – This test measures how effective your designs are at letting people accomplish an intended task. You only need a static image of your interface for this test so you can easily test websites, software interfaces, and mobile apps in addition to mockups and wireframes.
  To make this test click on “Know More” button under the test description on the main page and then you may choose to take a sample test and view sample reports or proceed to creating the test.
• Question Test – This test allows you to get feedback from real people with incredibly straightforward design surveys. This test can be used on any type of design. Simply upload the image and enter the questions you’d like testers to answer about it.
  To make this test click on “Know More” button under the test description on the main page and then you may choose to take a sample test and view sample reports or proceed to creating the test.
• Navflow Test – This test lets you see how effectively users navigate around your websites and applications. Navflow tests help you improve your conversion rates and are ideal for testing checkout and signup flows. It allows you to chain your designs by selecting which areas of each screen can be clicked to allow a person to progress to the next screen.
  To make this test click on “Know More” button under the test description on the main page and then you may choose to take a sample test and view sample reports or proceed to creating the test.
• Preference Test – This test helps you to confidently choose between two design options by asking users which one they prefer. This test is great for choosing between variations of logos, color schemes, layouts, copy, icons and interfaces. Since real users have the final say, design debates are settled quickly.
  To make this test click on “Know More” button under the test description on the main page and then you may choose to take a sample test and view sample reports or proceed to creating the test.

Additional Features

UsabilityHub lets you decide who views your tests – for ordered responses, your tests are shown to the UsabilityHub community, for responses from recruited testers you can show the test to anyone by sharing the test link. Moreover, the tool allows you to earn credits (called karma points) by contributing to the community in the form of taking other people’s tests. Each test you complete earns you 1 point and these points can be used to order responses.
The Pro account comes with advanced features like Chaining tests together, post-test redirects, demographic surveying and targeting etc.

• Settle design debates with data thanks to @usabilityhub usabilityhub.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Summing it up

All in all, UsabilityHub seems to be kind of a perfect tool that allows you just the kind of flexibility you want. Depending upon your need, you can choose to receive up to 20 responses with a free account, or more with a pro one. Also, it helps foster a more powerful message in the UX community – the user is the king!

Imagine you’re a web developer or website owner. From your point of view, what would be the key things towards building a successful website? Unique content, search engine optimization algorithms, attractive web design and such. After putting all of this in place and satisfying yourself of every little detail, you’d probably go ahead and launch your website. Now what would be the next step? Evaluating the impact! That’s where the truth will lie. That’s what will tell you how fruitful all the hours that went into building that website proved to be. But how would you know about the impact?

While some web development tools like WordPress offer plugins to monitor site statistics that specify the number of visitors and visits per day, even such plugins have limits. They don’t include everything. They don’t highlight which areas on your website are gaining maximum attention and which minimum. Plus, everyone doesn’t use WordPress. So then how would you evaluate user impact and gain insights to your website’s reach to its target audience? Through unique and brilliant online utilities like UsabilityTools!

UsabilityTools – See your website as a user would!

UsabilityTools is a web portal that brings together some of the most amazing features that can help website owners capture visual conversion insights and analyze them to increase conversions on actionable user insights. By capturing user gestures like mouse hovers and clicks on specific buttons, text or other areas on your website, this portal helps you know exactly “what” on your website is attracting the most users and “how” you can improve the areas that aren’t as appealing.

Here’s a brief glance over this tool’s features:

• By enabling you to capture mouse movement, UsabilityTools helps you discover the difference between the most and the least converting user behaviors.
• Unique engagement metrics feature helps you find out which users make the most clicks during their visits thus spotting conversion barriers and usability issues.
• Supports smooth playback of user recordings of any resolutions on mobile devices, tablets as well as desktops.
• It works just as well with static and dynamic websites. Even if your website has carousel forms and drop-downs, that’s not a problem.

There are 3 basic utilities or more correctly, tools offered by UsabilityTools, viz. UX Suite, Conversion Suite and Voice of Customer.

UX Suite is an online suite of small testing utilities to evaluate the User Experience through your website. It includes Click Testing (to validate design concepts), Web Testing (to optimize usability remotely), Survey (where you can ask users questions and get answers) and Card Sorting (to organize your website such that it makes sense to your audience). Since everything is online, it enables an extremely efficient way of remote testing that’s 100% browser based without the need for any plugins or special hardware.

Conversion Suite is where the real power of UsabilityTools lies. Here you can actually translate user-browsing patterns into actionable insights. By tracking how your users are viewing your website, where they are leaving the pages where they are paying attention etc., you can eliminate confusion causing fields and make your forms and other content more suitable to user preferences thereby increasing your site traffic.

Voice of Customer is where you get to directly interact with your customers. Ask them questions and get real-time feedback with no technicalities. Here you can customize feedback forms so as to establish better relationships with your users.

How it rolls

To try out the conversion suite you’ll have to sign-up for a free 14 day trial. Signing up is smooth and free. Once you do, you are allowed to create a new project. Give it a unique name and go ahead to adding scripts to your website by copying them from UsabilityTools. Or if you find yourself confused you can send an email message to the team to seek their help. A convenient tutorial is provided to help you out along the way. It contains screenshots etc to give an idea of how things should look once rolling.

To try out the UX Suite hit the “Try as a participant” button on the UX Suite page and you’ll be redirected to a survey. It is simple to follow and follows a click-next approach.

For anything else that you’d like to try out, there are plenty of “Talk to us” buttons that strangely instead of taking you straightaway to the contact us form, direct you to the pricing page first. Call it their marketing strategy, but we found it rather unnecessary. A simple redirection to the contact us form would’ve been good.

Pros VS Cons

Well, it may sound harsh, but it was a bit tough to find a plus point to this tool. The idea behind it is good but somehow, using the utilities is not very simple. It is very difficult and confusing to understand what to do with the tool and how to use it. The website look is fine, navigation menus are okay etc, but to what end? From a user’s point of view, only if you are very familiar with such kind of tools can you figure out what to do with this tool.

Plus every time you wish to clear your confusion by hitting the “Talk to us” button, you’re first redirected to the Pricing page that makes you think the makers are interested in earning from the service first and making it of use to customers later.

• Build a better web experience for your users by knowing what they’re liking: @usabilitytools usabilitytools.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Verdict

All in all, not a very recommended tool since it is quite confusing to deal with and figure out. We honestly couldn’t comprehend why it was made. Maybe we started off at the wrong foot. But there would be a lot of people out there who’d also land up where we did. So maybe there should’ve been something there to help people understand what it’s all about. What an irony, a tool that’s aimed at helping people improve visual conversion insights has quite poor visual insights itself!

Customer development and customer management these days require a huge investment of hands on time by the founders in interviewing the market participants, but as an organization grows and expands one hardly gets enough time to get the details about the customer experience by the customers who may or may not buy your services. There is always a scope of improvement and for improving the services you offer on your website you need to understand the user behavior on your website.
When you are aware of the intentions of the user and issues which may keep the user away from taking a decision you seek for, you would make changes based on these details which will enhance your website, improve the site performance and increase your revenues.

Let us assume you had a shop in the real world and all or most of the customers  who visit your shop walk away after having  a look at the products without making a deal, now wouldn’t you ask them the reason and try to come up with an offer which would suit the customer. Qualaroo does the same thing now if you have an online shop you would obviously like to know why a user didn’t buy your product this is where Qualaroo steps in by asking certain set of relevant questions like Are these services too expensive? Or the products you stock are irrelevant or not according to the needs of the visitor.

Qualaroo helps you get deep inside the heads of the people who visit your website and know what these visitor think about your business and what barriers keep them away from converting. It helps you understand and improve user experience on your website and drive better results. Qualaroo offers services called Qualaroo Insights, Qualaroo Convert and Qualaroo for Mobile.

Qualaroo Insights

Easy to build and design micro surveys targeting your audience as they surf your website can be integrated using a single code which you need to install on your website. Qualaroo offers intelligent question branching so that you can nest up a new question based on a previous answer or answers. Qualaroo includes a library of questions which you can include in your surveys to ask the visitor making the survey more efficient and perfect. There may be a difference between what a user says and what he does on your website, thus Qualaroo can be effortlessly integrated with Google Analytics or KISSmetrics to offer a proper detail about a user experience like what a visitor did and why he did that. You can take more informed decisions and update your websites in accordance with the requirements of the visitor to ensure a decent conversion rate.

Qualaroo Convert

Qualaroo convert enables you to tap more sales by giving the right offer or content and it makes you aware of the unique needs of a user to achieve that. Redirecting users to a call to action screen which may offer discounted rates for services. You can deal with last minute objections of the users more efficiently using qualaroo with fewer efforts. It can be easily integrated with the live chat services. After asking a few questions you may lead your visitors to a live chat session where a representative can solve his or her queries. You can also ask a few questions and present the user with a offer which may lead to an increased conversion rate.

Qualaroo for Mobile

Qualaroo is the first survey service available for mobile users visiting your website. Qualaroo enables you to know the needs of the mobile users and offer your services accordingly.

Qualitative Analysis of your business

Instead of going for numerical analysis Qualaroo allows you to have qualitative analysis of your business for example, It may allow you to ask open end questions so that users may write whatever they feel about your services instead of asking them to rate your business on the scale of 5 or 10 and providing insights like 56% users like your services. By asking open ended questions Qualaroo would allow you to come up with more creative and innovative ideas to increase your business. Though this may take time but would surely help you a lot with Qualaroo performing most of the tasks you would just have to read feedbacks and respond in the right direction. Qualaroo allows you to collect the data and export them into an excel sheet to keep a record of the areas you need to work on. It also allows you to create pie charts on the data collected.

Points to keep in mind while creating surveys on Qualaroo:

1. Feedback should be asked only once to the user and not as many times he would visit the website.
2. Always check how the survey comes up on your website and place it according to the website design it shouldn’t appear out of the place.
3. Always thank people who complete surveys on your website as they are giving you their valuable time to enhance your services.
4. Being polite while you create and place your surveys would surely help you a lot and these surveys should appear as spams to the people who visit your website.
5. Always schedule your surveys.
6. Ask more open ended questions.
7. You can or you must ask for email address to contact in case you would like to get in touch with the customer who visits your website.

Pros

• Offers customizable surveys that is, you can create a survey on your own or use the survey questions recommended for the kind of website you own.
• Comes with attractive themes and has a good visual appeal which would easily complement any website.
• You can select who should see your survey like for returning visitors or people who visit for the first time.
• Has wonderfully easy to handle dashboard with easy installation.
• Works awesomely well with http as well as https pages which have secure SSL certificate.
• Provides immediate feedback from users.
• Offers better customization than other available options for similar tasks
• No training required.
• It is useful not only for ecommerce websites but also for blogs and forums as it would allow you to ask people what would they like you to write about.

Cons

• Wont capture details when a user leaves in comparison to some other available options.
• Expensive for small scale business.
• It often seems to track impressions rather than tracking the unique visits.

• Create smart micro surveys targeting your audience as they surf your website with @Qualaroo qualaroo.com via @supermonitoring

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Qualaroo is an innovative tool to tap more deals from your own website than targeting some other website’s audience and gaining traffic from them. Installing a small code snippet would bring wonders to your website or blog and would efficiently increase your sales for sure.
I strongly recommend people to use Qualaroo themselves and do write us about your experiences. That’s all for now. Toodles!