Once you know which UX research and design strategies you want to implement when developing your ecommerce site, you’ll want to narrow down which tools to use. Familiarize yourself with the most commonly used UX research, design, and collaboration tools, noting their distinguishing features, to decide which ones fit best with your specific goals.
Research
Usability testing, interviews, focus groups
Zoom is currently the most popular video conferencing tool for studies involving usability testing, interviews, or focus groups. It’s conducive to both small or large group meetings and can record sessions. Skype, Google Hangouts, and GoToMeeting offer similar features as Zoom, such as screen sharing; however, only Zoom has a remote control option for you and participants to control each other’s screens. FocusVision is a tool that allows you to run card-sorting exercises as part of a usability test or interview. If you want to store recorded sessions, timestamped notes, and comments all in one place, use Lookback. This tool can also record screen touch for users meeting on a touchscreen device.
Usertesting, UserInterviews, and UserZoom have multi-method capabilities for conducting surveys, interviews, focus groups, and multi-day studies. You can also use these tools to recruit participants from a specific target audience. Crazy Egg additionally also offers A/B testing, scroll and click heatmaps, confetti reports, qualitative surveys, and recorded user sessions. Hotjar offers similar features and can integrate surveys and polls to assess users’ intentions, needs, and issues.
Most of these online tools already have video recording capabilities; however, video recording software is available to record sessions, as are transcription services, if needed.
Surveys
The most popular online survey tools are Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, UserZoom, and Google Forms. These tools enable you to program advanced skip logic, choose from numerous question types (e.g., multiple choice, text entry, rating scales, rankings, drag and drop), track responses, export and filter data, and create data visualizations. Qualtrics offers additional question types and tools, such as heatmaps, matrices, screen capture, prebuilt survey templates, multimedia uploads, the ability to export data into CSV and SPSS files, or to conduct statistical analyses within the program. Qualtrics also provides personalized recommendations on how to design your survey to increase response rates. UserZoom shares many of the same features, while SurveyMonkey has 1,600+ questions written by experts, and GoogleForms has user-created templates to choose from.
Card sorting
With online card-sorting tools, you can conduct open or closed remote card-sorting sessions and quickly generate reports. OptimalSort combines card sorting with their tree testing tool so you can gain additional insight for your site’s architecture. UserZoom can calculate how users group topics similarly, as well as export data into Excel. UsabiliTEST’s hybrid card sorting session combines open and closed card sorting (try it out!). With Proven by Users, you can add images and use surveys to learn how user groups categorize topics.
Diary studies
Google Forms and Google Sheets are popular for text-based diary studies. Dscout, Blink, and Indeemo enable users to upload photos, videos, and audio recordings in addition to text entries. Also, you can integrate surveys into your diary studies. Indeemo has a mobile screen recording feature that captures user interaction with your site while on a mobile device.
A/B testing
Many of the tools available for remote A/B testing, such as A/B Tasty, give you the option of univariate and multivariate testing, split testing, or multi-page testing. You can recreate page variations within the tool itself. With Optimizely, you can run multiple online experiments on the same webpage. To conduct multiple tests simultaneously or to run tests based on real-time user behavior, VWO is a good tool. A/B testing with Crazy Egg automatically sends participants to the best-performing page in order to maximize your conversion rates, instead of equally splitting participants between the pages being tested. If you have technical expertise and want to test advanced technical issues, use Convert . Here is a complete list of A/B tools with customer reviews.
Scroll/click heatmaps
For click, scroll, and mouse movement heatmaps, use Hotjar or Crazy Egg. With Hotjar, you can poll and survey users to assess their intentions, needs and issues. CrazyEgg can also create confetti heatmaps for you to track individual clicks, identify where your site visitors come from (traffic source), and learn how clicking behaviors differ by traffic source. Inspectlet tags users to track their behaviors across multiple site visits. Mouseflow tracks how users from different traffic sources behave differently (like CrazyEgg’s confetti heatmap feature).
Design and collaboration
Many of the most popular UX design tools are capable of helping you create multiple deliverables, which may involve adding software plugins, extensions, and/or integrations so that the entire UX design process can occur in one place.
Figma, Sketch, and Justinmind are some of the most popular tools to help you develop user personas, journey maps, user flows, wireframes, and prototypes. FlowMapp is popular for creating journey maps and user flows, while AdobeXD is a popular tool for wireframing and prototyping, though many of these tools have overlapping capabilities. These tools also have a variety of collaborative capabilities for designers, developers, stakeholders and managers: comments and feedback, simultaneous editing, track changes, shared access to widget and cloud libraries, code optimization, updates, and varied access levels and roles.
Utilizing the best UX tools will equip you with all you need for developing your ecommerce site. Whether you’re ready to start building your site or need help along the way, our UX experts at Trackmind can help!
