People still believe that usability testing could be performed only in state-of-art usability labs. Gone are those days where we needed to invite the participants to our office, arrange parking space and also provide snacks and refreshments for them. Now the usability labs are much smaller, affordable, and portable and are very efficient to use, we call it - Discount usability lab. (Of course borrowed the term “discount usability” from Jakob Nielsen)

Discount Usability labs addresses the challenges of cost and time and has placed usability well within the reach of those who can’t afford the time or money to commission professional laboratory usability studies. In fact with this facility we could have more number of design iterations than earlier. Now usability testing has become even simpler with remote usability testing tools such as Morae from Techsmith and others, it provides an easier access to the participants in their natural environment.

With this simple setup we have not only been able to run usability tests on web and mobile applications but also conduct them remotely. This method also gives the flexibility to adapt the usability setup as new devices emerge.

List of devices required for a mobile remote usability testing are: