Free Tools for Remote User Research Testing
A list of free online UX testing tools for remote user research, organized by methods including: interviews, usability testing, click tests, card sorting, diary studies, surveys, experience sampling, field studies, analytics, and participant recruiting tips.
*Please note that not all tools may be GDPR-compliant for data and privacy protection. Please check with your legal department*
Given the times, a lot of researchers including myself have made the switch to remote research, and it’s a great time to exercise creativity with our methods and approach problems in different ways.
I’m going to share a list of about 10 free tools I’ve used before organized by different methods. These tools will probably cover 90% of what you need to do, but by no means is this a comprehensive list if you want to spend more time researching tools.
Keep in mind for any of these you’ll still need to recruit your own participants…and participants aren’t free.
If you’re interested in how to conduct some of these methods, I got just the YouTube video playlist for you Method Mondays where I go over the pros and cons of different methods and how to conduct them, including usability testing, diary studies, field research, card sorting, and more.
Now, on to the list!
Remote Interviews
My personal favourite would be Zoom because there’s this great hack you can use where you can grant remote control access to your screen so your user can control your prototype and you don’t have to host the prototype anywhere. You can record everything, although there are limitations for the free version, like 40-minutes maximum for one session.
But let’s be honest, the best and only reason to use Zoom is you can hide your messy work-from-home environment by changing your background.
*There have been recent security issues with Zoom with data protection and privacy. Please exercise caution and consult with your legal team before using it*
Usability Testing
- Laptop hug method — old school, cheap but effective if you’re testing with mobile or hardware devices
- Zoom with screen share
- Loop11
- LookBack — in my YouTube video on unmoderated usability testing, I show an example using LookBack. You simply upload your prototype, set the tasks, send a link to your participants to test, and voila.
Click Testing (5-second, first click)
- Unfortunately there’s no real tool that’s COMPLETELY free for this, but you can always use Google Hangouts, Skype, or Zoom to screen share for 5 seconds, and then stop it. Rudimentary, but if you can’t afford anything, there are always hacks around it.
- Chalkmark from Optimal Workshop* (Trial)
- UseBerry — a tool I only heard about, but haven’t used myself, but they can also do usability tests with Sketch or Figma prototypes.
Card Sorting
Trello — I use Trello both professionally and personally for prioritization and organization of projects.
You can create unlimited boards with your choice to conduct open or closed card sorts, and share it with your user. They simply drag and drop the cards around to how they want to organize the cards and they can rename the categories.
Combine it with Zoom or another screen sharing tool to watch them do it live! Here is my template for an open card sort.
Remote Diary / Beeper Studies (Experience Sampling)
- Google Forms — trusty ol’ Google Forms. It’s free and easy to create simple forms for people to fill out. I’ve used them for diary studies where I would send the form to participants when I needed to.
- PACO **— Personal Analytics Companion Mobile for behavioural research and quantified self. You can use it as a diary study tool or for experience sampling. I’ve used PACO for an experience sampling project around wearables, where I would automatically ping participants every few hours to tell me what they’re doing at that moment, like a beeper study.
- Text messaging — there are some SMS apps that allow you to function similar to PACO, where you can send automatic texts to participants. Here’s a list compiled by Tamlin Conner (University of Otago).
**PACO is currently not compliant for data collection usage in EU and Switzerland.
Surveys
- Google Forms — trusty ol’ Google Forms. It’s free, easy…oh. Already went over this. Yes, it’s traditionally used as a free survey tool. While it does not have complex validation or logic like Qualtrics does, it is free.
- SurveyMonkey
- Typeform
Field Studies
You might not expect online tools to replace field studies. And you’d be right. However, there are ways around not being able to directly observe your participants from the comfort of your own quarantine. Instead, bring them to you…through video.
- Body camera — If your team has the budget to send participants body cameras, they can hit record at certain moments of their day and you can observe their actions.
- Use diary study methods and tools, along with reminding participants to take photos and videos of their workspace or environment as artefacts and share them safely in a cloud platform like Google or DropBox.
Analytics
- Google Analytics — the free version gives you enough data to know your traffic, cohort analysis feature, session length, bounce rates, pages per session, and integrates with Google Ads, so you can also track the performance of your ads. Every data person, business owner, researcher, should learn how to use this powerful tool.
- Crazyegg* — It is not a completely free tool, but you get a 30-day free trial and allows you to assess your website, A/B test, visualize heatmaps, click rates on your email campaigns etc…Why use Crazyegg though if you can use Google for free? Well, you can record user sessions like a usability testing tool, too.
Conclusion
There are many tools out there, but not all are created equal. And certainly not all are FREE. This list can help get you most of the way there — if you have really specialized research, a quick search will yield tons of other tools out there to help you. What other tools have you used? Did I miss anything? Feel free to leave a reply of your favourite free online UX testing tools!
Thanks for reading! If you want to see more UX research-related content, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel, Zero to UX.
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to learn more about User Research, then consider to take the online course User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Alternatively, there is an entire course on Usability Testing which includes templates you can use in your own projects. Lastly, if you want to brush up on the basics of UX and Usability, you might take the online course on User Experience. Good luck on your learning journey!
