Usertesting.com lets you pay $5 to test any screen

Usertesting.com just launched a new way to buy 1-on-1 screen recordings. You describe what you want to test — a landing page, a checkout flow, a new feature — and someone in the US opens your site in a new tab, talks through it out loud, and sends back a 60-second video with their mouse and voice captured. You pay $5 for the recording.

The model is simple. Each recording is 60 seconds, $5, one person, one task, one voice. No decks. No slides. Just a real person trying to do something on your site and telling you what they ran into. The recordings come back quickly and are easy to watch on a phone or laptop while you're commuting.

This is a different kind of research than a survey or a focus group. You're watching one person at a time, but you can order a batch and spot patterns — where people drop off, what confuses them, what they do instead of what you planned. It's the kind of thing that used to mean booking a lab, recruiting, and a full afternoon. Now it's a tab you open, a prompt you write, and $5 per person.

Why this matters for us: for the primo running a side hustle or the small shop testing a new menu page, this is a way to catch mistakes before they hit — fast, cheap, and without a research consultant.