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You can get a ton of value out of usability tests without going all-in on a usability lab. Buy screenflow and a USB microphone to record sessions, and then recruit people for $50 a pop to come in and go through your product.

Steve Krug calls it "Lost Our Lease Usability Testing" and explains how to do it in Don't Make Me Think. You can download the relevant chapters here: http://www.sensible.com/downloads-dmmt.html

We did this at a company I worked at a few years ago and it made us completely change how we were building the product because our target users got nothing out of it (I talked a bit about this a RubyFringe: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/francl-testing-overrated)

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The sequel to Don't Make Me Think is entirely about how to do quick usability testing. It's called Rocket Surgery Made Easy, and I highly recommend it. He walks through each of the tools used, how to structure questions, and all of the other important pieces.

It made starting my grad work in usability much less painful.

I don't think a usability lab is that expensive. A few webcams, a mike, plus a laptop and mobile phone is all you need. That probably totals to at most $3k.

Both kinds of feedback, lab and cafe, are useful. They each provide a different kind of feedback, from a focused and unfocused user so they aren't mutually exclusive. Rather, both are worthwhile.

Keeping an extra room costs way more than that. It doesn't make any sense for most companies to have a dedicated lab, you're not going to run usability tests all day, every day.

Plenty of market research companies offer rooms like this for rent.

It doesn't cost that much, really. The salary of the guy running the lab is the largest expense by far. At a startup I worked at a few years ago, they had a lab running 40 hours a week. It would have cost about 10 times as much to have a market research company do this for us if it was even possible.

A couple companies ago we did it the CEO's office. Over the course of a day we brought in a half dozen people recruited from Craigslist. That one day alone gave us a lot of useful info.

My point is that the article calls for post-Series A companies to have "a soundproofed room with a table in the center flanked by two chairs, one for a user and one product manager or UX researcher" with "a constellation of web cams".

You don't need that to get value. Initial investment for "lost our lease" usability testing is $99 for Screenflow and $70 for a Snowball USB microphone. It would help to do the test in a room that's not full of people, but grab a conference room, or do it after work.

There's no reason a bootstrapped startup can't afford this -- in fact, there's an argument to be made that they can't afford NOT to do it.

I wonder if there is a market for "usability screen recording" software, which records simultaneously from both the screen and a webcam, and lets you play back the two streams in a split-screen format.

Screenflow can do this. http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/

I thought about starting a company to do exactly this. The near term would be to offer it as an in-person service (consulting), then use that experience to develop an MVP.

There are a few companies doing this already, so not exactly new.

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