What user research or usability testing tools are most valuable and easy to use?

We at http://watchsend.com have an iOS library for developers to install that allows them to see video recordings of users' activity.

Take a look at http://www.usabilitytools.com - set of online tools that help optimize websites for higher conversion and better user experience. The tools range from behavioral web analytics to remote usability.

I suggest you to take a look at  http://www.appsee.com Briefly, Appsee (where I work) provides a remote usability and user experience testing, that enables app developers and publishers to visually understand exactly how their users interact with their app and improve the UI and usability within the app (includes user recordings and touch heatmaps). Moreover, it detects and records crashed sessions automatically. You can see the exact sequence of actions that resulted in a crash with your own eyes and identify the single UI element causing the crash. Setup &integration is quite easy- just drop Appsee SDK in your app and add a single line of code (it takes less than 1 minute).

Take a look at http://www.utest.com uTest (where I work) offers in-the-wild usability testing where your app is tested by real users, with real devices, using the app under real-world conditions. In addition, uTest’s usability offering includes a usability expert to help you optimize your test and a comprehensive report outlining the results with recommended next steps. http://www.utest.com/usability-testing

Here is one that I've used: http://usertesting.com. I've also used surveymonkey. In both cases, there is art and skill in designing the test and getting valid data. I think it's easy to unintentionally skew the results.

The best way to assess usability of your website is to ask your visitors what they think of it. Users' feedback can give you more than quantitative analysis conducted with tools like Google Analytics. You can collect feedback from your users by asking them simple questions using software like http://survicate.com/. Short surveys conducted using our widgets can help you discover usability problems and get users' ideas on how to improve it. The tool is easy to use - setting up a survey takes about 3 minutes and no coding skills are required. If you're interested in gathering feedback this way you can take a look at a post on our blog, which explains what specific question you should ask when your goal is to improve usability: http://survicate.com/blog/5-usability-questions-to-ask-your-visitors/.  Disclaimer: I work for Survicate.

Get ready for the most biased answer ever: I think you should check out UsersThink - http://usersthink.com/ - for feedback on your website usability and research :) But the part of the question that caught my eye was "easy to use", and this is one of the primary things I've focused on in building UsersThink. There are lots of "powerful" feedback and testing tools out there, but the complexity of asking the "right" questions can become an ordeal in itself. When I was doing website usability consulting, I had a number of tools I'd use when analysing a potential or new customers site, but the user feedback process was something that never returned a positive ROI for the initial phase of work or outreach. I kept thinking "why hasn't someone standardized this?" until I broke down and decided to build the damn tool myself :) It took a lot of work, and a lot of failure and screwups at first (I ended up doing 30+ iterations till I had version 1 done), but it quickly became the most valuable tool in my arsenal. All I had to do was enter the link to the landing page I wanted feedback on, hit "send" and within 24 hours I would get focused feedback, leading to new insights I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. After a while, I thought "wow, this is so direct to set up, but still very powerful, I think this could work as its own tool." And it has :)

You have to choose a proper method for the types of questions you are trying to solve, and then choose a tool that supports the chosen methods. You may want to choose from a variety of web usability tools. Or you may need to build an user research lab with multiple webcams and wirecast. Or you may want to use something like Mechanical Turk, or an eyetracking solution that supports high latency. The first step to this is add enough context to your inquiry on Quora. Asking right questions are far more important than blind data.

Have you ever heard aboutCard Sorting,The Expert Review,Eye Movement TrackingandRemote Usability Testing?You can find out about these techniques in the following article:https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/7-great-tried-and-tested-ux-research-techniques?ep=mbOther good sources arehttps://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/user-research/index.html