10 Best Usability Testing Tools of 2023 for Improving Your UX

The team behind Userlytics boasts over 14 years of experience in UX research. Userlytics is a remote user testing platform that allows you to build a study, select participants, and gather UX insights. 

Why I picked Userlytics: I’m delighted at the prospect of testing your concept sketches and prototypes, even before a product goes live. Userlytics helps you to conduct prototype testing throughout the product development lifecycle (PDLC). Moreover, the Userlytics platform is compatible with popular prototyping tools like Figma and Axure. 

Userlytics helps you define the right target audience with advanced demographic filters. For instance, if your app targets middle-aged men in India, you can create a similar test audience to get highly curated testing responses.

Userlytics Standout Features and Integrations:

Standout features include integrated multimodal testing, which combines screen recording, auditory feedback, webcam recording, and eye-tracking. Userlytics also supports virtual reality (VR) testing of apps and prototypes designed for Oculus. 

Integrations include Adobe XD, Axure, Figma, and Protopie. 

The team behind UXtweak amassed tremendous experience in UX research before building this platform. UXtweak has always been looking to add new testing tools like the first click test, preference test, prototype testing, and others.

Why I picked UXtweak: As a customer experience specialist, I relish understanding what users feel about my digital products. With UXtweak, you can leverage several user empathy tools.

One popular user empathy tool is the five second test; the objective is to gauge participants’ memory of your design after five seconds. The test results can quickly articulate how cluttered or straightforward your website UI is. As a result, UXtweak actually helps you intelligently tweak your UI.

UXtweak Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature is UXtweak’s robust mobile app usability testing tool that screen records participants’ interactions with your app. You can design a well-curated target user base using the Online Recruiting feature.

Integration details are currently not available.

Datadog offers a plethora of critical application key performance indicators (KPIs) like mean time to resolution (MTTR). The Datadog platform collects helpful metrics that are useful for different stakeholders, including IT operations, developers, security, customer support, and business.

Why I picked Datadog: I’m amazed by the number of use cases that Datadog supports. Datadog collates information from several sources, including logs, traces, metrics, and metadata. 

Datadog is an absolute blessing for your operations team, as the tool helps reduce MTTR with a full-stack visibility platform. Furthermore, Datadog offers API tests to evaluate various system layers, including HTTP, DNS, SSL, etc. In a nutshell, Datadog elegantly combines usability testing features with security prowess to precisely monitor the performance and health of your cloud infrastructure and apps. 

Datadog Standout Features and Integrations:

Standout features include full-stack observability and anomaly detection. Datadog harnesses machine learning to impart intelligent alerting and anomaly detection for proactively identifying and handling issues in real time, assuring optimal system performance and dependability.

Integrations include 25+ tools like AWS, Azure, Bonsai, Boundary, Docker, DoControl, Drata, Google Cloud, Jira, Kubernetes, New Relic, PagerDuty, Slack and others.

SmartBear has a comprehensive collection of usability testing tools that serve several use cases, including UI testing, API quality testing, application stability testing, and performance bottleneck testing. SmartBear claims that its testing tools can help shorten your test cycle timelines by over 90%.

Why I picked SmartBear: As a former API developer, the sheer firepower that SmartBear packs is impressive. TestComplete, which is SmartBear’s automated UI testing tool, helps test different kinds of web applications. Additionally, SmartBear makes it easy to perform cross-browser tests in a matter of clicks. 

Testing usually involves setting up predefined test environments. BitBar, another SmartBear tool, grants you instant access to over 2,050 testing environments. Furthermore, VisualTest is another UI testing tool that leverages AI to streamline testing processes.

SmartBear Standout Features and Integrations:

SmartBear’s biggest standout feature, in my opinion, is it's easy-to-create test scripts. SmartBear’s InstaPlay Recorder helps you create and execute complex scripting transactions. BitBar enables you to simulate parallel automated tests on several devices and browsers. As a result, your testing productivity grows substantially.

Integrations include Bitbucket, Confluence, GitHub, HipChat, Jenkins, Jira, Selenium, Slack, TestRail, Trello and others.

Userbrain is a user testing tool that’s very easy to use. With tons of starter templates and a tester pool of over 100,000 people, it’s incredibly straightforward to design and conduct usability tests for your digital products.

Why I picked Userbrain: I’m a huge fan of internal collaboration. With Userbrain, you can effortlessly collaborate with your UX team. The platform allows you to assign tags and comments at any time stamp of the usability test recordings. Additionally, you can download comments as CSV resources to share with your team.

Userbrain’s reporting features are handy with several quantitative metrics like task completion rate and time on task. What’s remarkable is that these reports get updated in real-time as and when users complete testing your application or prototype.

Userbrain Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature for Userbrain is its testing scheduler that enables you to automate user testing. You can schedule weekly or monthly tests to build up the habit of user testing. Furthermore, Userbrain allows you to invite other testers (apart from the application’s tester pool). As a result, you can enroll your colleagues as testers to get their take on an application or website too. 

Integration details are currently not available.

UserZoom collects measurable and actionable experience insights from your product development journey. UserZoom has a tagline “the UX insights company,” and their platform is a testament to its mission. 

Why I picked UserZoom: UserZoom offers several user research techniques, such as remote usability testing, questionnaires, card sorting, and tree testing. Consequently, your user research process becomes concrete and simplified. UserZoom specializes in remote usability testing, enabling you to collect feedback from people worldwide. 

Additionally, UserZoom helps garner valuable insights into user behavior through screen recording and task-based testing. UserZoom's powerful analytics and reporting tools help analyze user data, spot trends, and produce actionable insights.

UserZoom Standout Features and Integrations:

UserZoom’s biggest standout feature is their massive participant pool of over 120 million. As a result, you can onboard people possessing varying industry experience for your UX research. UserZoom also has enterprise-level scalability, which makes it appropriate for large-scale usability testing projects and organizations with a significant user base.

Integrations include Figma, Google Analytics 360, InVision, Marvel, Mixpanel, Tableau, Tealium Customer Data Hub, Unbounce, and others.

The usability testing tools provided by Optimal Workshop help conduct effective and efficient user behavioral research of your digital products. Some notable tools that the platform offers include Treejack (a tree testing tool) and Reframer (a qualitative research tool).

Why I picked Optimal Workshop: Treejack, the tree testing tool of Optimal Workshop, helps determine how people get lost on your website. Reducing browsing friction can be a gamechanger in improving your online conversions. 

With Treejack, you can quickly test site structures and redesign your existing UI to improve the user experience. Additionally, Treejack generates automated insights to make data-based decisions. For instance, if you’re looking to relaunch an ecommerce site, you could conduct tree tests that include questions like “You want a refund. Where do you click?” In a nutshell, tree testing helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your website content.

Optimal Workshop Standout Features and Integrations:

One standout feature, in my opinion, is Optimal Workshop’s  intuitive qualitative research workflow. Optimal Workshop offers Reframer - a reliable tool for drawing meaningful insights from siloes of qualitative research data points. You can visualize and categorize connections between observations to discover vital user insights. Optimal Workshop also has an integrated research archive to document and leverage customer learnings. 

Integration details are currently not available.

UsabilityHub is a renowned testing tool because of its efficient and focused insights. Leveraging a platform like UsabilityHub helps you evaluate real user data to back design decisions. The platform features several practical usability testing methods like click tests, preference tests, and navigation flow testing.

Why I picked UsabilityHub: I’m impressed by the tool’s ease of use, user-friendly design, and clear insights. I’m particularly thrilled by the first click test feature that UsabilityHub offers. You can capture users’ first clicks and measure how long users take to complete particular tasks on a webpage. As a result, you gain vital visibility into the friction your users experience while navigating a website.

UsabilityHub effectively measures the intuitiveness of user interfaces using task-based assessments. Moreover, the platform offers an effective and reliable method of analyzing user experience.

UsabilityHub Standout Features and Integrations:

Standout features include unique analysis mechanisms like card sorting, prototype testing, design surveys, and five-second tests. Preference tests collect user preferences, allowing for more informed design decisions. Flow testing is another interesting approach to website usability testing.

Integration details are currently not available.

Maze is a usability testing tool that optimizes your customer experience research process. With Maze, you can effectively integrate the customer’s voice into your development cycles. 

Why I picked Maze: I’m enthralled by the feedback-prompting feature that Maze offers. You can prompt users to leave feedback if you seek inputs on a particular section of a webpage or an application. 

Moreover, Maze also offers practical resources like the “participants in-app” and “measure NPS over time” templates. Maze also packs a unique feature that allows you to measure user deviations from predefined paths on a website. With such a microscopic emphasis on your digital users’ behavior, you can quickly identify potential areas of improvement.

Maze Standout Features and Integrations:

Standout features include great visual and context-rich reporting that cumulates various parameters into a usability score. You can also A/B test different web elements to improve the usability score. Additionally, Maze enables you to embed screener surveys on specific web pages to recruit new users for UX research.

Integrations include Adobe XD, Figma, Notion, Sketch, and Slack.

Since the inception of Dovetail back in 2017, the founders have emphasized building software that unravels deep customer understanding. With a massive customer base of over 3,200 companies, Dovetail is a heavyweight in the usability testing market.

Why I picked Dovetail: Ever since ChatGPT took the internet by storm, I’ve always been on the lookout for tools that embrace AI. Dovetail enables you to leverage AI to summarize notes and insights. Consequently, you can save time by quickly identifying key themes in documents, interviews, or customer feedback.

Dovetail’s theme library is a delight if you’re into bold colors and minimalist design. One theme category is “turn feedback into insights,” which has awesome themes that can help you get off the blocks quickly.

Dovetail Standout Features and Integrations:

One of Dovetail’s standout features is its research repository that centralizes user research data. The research repository is similar to an internal Wikipedia with all your customer research. In addition, Dovetail’s affinity mapping features help you group similar research into clusters. Subsequently, you can add valuable information to your research repository for future reference.

Integrations include 15+ tools such as Confluence, Google Drive, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Notion, Productboard, SharePoint, Slack, Trello, Zoom, and others.