We’d like to announce a big new change, which should allow more people to benefit from GhostRec’s awesome usability testing capabilities.

For a long time now, each new registered user got 100 credits ($5 worth) for free, giving him a chance to try out the service. The reason for this is that we don’t want to force people into buying something, unless they’re certain they love it.

Now we extend this “100 free credits” idea, and give each user 100 free credits every month. Hopefully, more website owners will find themselves doing usability testing now, which means they’ll have happier customers and that’s what it’s all about.

Being able to do website visitor recordings has never been easier or cheaper – give it a try.

Since one of our core team members is actually from Bulgaria, we decided the next language to make the website available in to be Bulgarian.

With that change, we hope to make ourselves (and usability testing in general) accessible to one more group of people .

We’d love to have our website translated to even more languages in the future, but for now we only want to provide languages that we speak and can provide support in.

So, if you’re from Bulgaria or Sweden and need support, feel free to contact us in your native language.

Losing visitors from a regular website is bad, but losing visitors from your webshop directly means you’re losing money.

Using GhostRec allows you to minimize one of the factors preventing visitors from buying your products – bad website usability, leading to poor customer satisfaction and low conversion rate.

Bringing up the quality of service

The most important attribute of any kind of shop is offering high-quality products at reasonable prices.
When many webshops do that, or when your prices or products are not that competitive, you’ll need to look into the other factors, so that you would bring your quality of service up to a level that customers are happy with.

In the end, customers are not always looking for the cheapest offer they can find.
Often times it’s about buying a product from a trusted and easy to use place, without much hassle.

There are tons of webshops out there that look and feel terrible. Buying stuff from them is torture. Spending many minutes navigating back and forth gives you the feeling that you’re doing a mistake.
Each minute of torture pops up the question “Should I just save myself the trouble and buy this from WebshopX, even though it’s more expensive there?”
You don’t want your users to feel that way.

Pinpointing the problem

Solving a usability problem is like solving any other problem. It’s a two-part process. You first need to identify the problem and then decide how to best solve it.
You know your problem is there somewhere, but where is it and how can you find it?

GhostRec is a usability testing tool, which helps you with the first and hardest part of your usability problem – identifying that it exists and pinpointing its location.

By setting up GhostRec on your webshop, you’ll be able to watch replays of how visitors surf your website.
It’s as if you’re standing besides your customer, observing his actions without him knowing that you’re there.
This shows you unbiased results, directly from your customers in their “natural habitat“, as opposed to doing regular usability testing (lab tests) with people being freaked out from being recorded.

To learn more See a video of how it works (below) or Try a demo and see for yourself.

Summary

So, if you’re looking to increase conversion rate and customer satisfaction, be sure to give GhostRec a try.

Our usability testing tool is easy to install on any website and works in all environments.
Registering gives you 100 free credits, which allow you to see whether you like our service or not, before buying some more credits.
No subscriptions, no contracts. It’s easy to try and easy to give up (if that’s how you feel).
We don’t see what you have to lose?

Video of how to make a Quick usability study

We have made a video on how to make a Quick usability study. Its very easy, and fun! Check it out at Youtube.com.

This update is what we believe usability improvements are all about – making it easier and more pleasant for people to use a given system. Thanks to all of the hundreds of companies that helped us with ideas and thoughts on how to perfect our service.

Faster and more polished user panel

The user panel has gotten a speed increase of almost 5 times, giving you a more pleasant experience
while using it. A slow website is one of the most common usability problems on the web, and bothers everyone that’s using it, no matter how useful the content is.

We’ve also applied many changes to the website layout, making it simpler and better. A simpler and more visually appealing layout brings joy to visitors of websites.   One of our new features that we told you about recently – Heatmaps – has also received some updates. Heatmaps should be even more beautiful and our advanced algorithm is fine tuned even more.   Check out the new user panel

Include code troubleshooter

And for those that have trouble installing our include code on your websites, we’ve built a tool that helps you with that. We check your website from time to time and analyze whether the include code is installed correctly. The troubleshooter can detect various problems related to that and report them back to you, right in our user panel.

We believe this can help you solve some of the problems related to an incorrect install of the Include code,
without you having to contact our support team. Even if you’re certain you’re doing things right, it’s always nice to have some reassurance.

So, follow our example and think of some new improvements you can make to your own website. Assess your replays carefully and experiment with solutions.

With GhostRec, it’s very easy to confirm what works and what doesn’t.

Supported browsers

	Internet Explorer 6-8
	Internet Explorer 9 (new!)
	Firefox 2.x – 3.x
	Firefox 4.x (new!)
	Chrome 1.x-10.x
	Chrome 11.x (new!)
	Opera 7.x-10.x
	Opera 11.x (new!)
	Safari 3.x – 4.x
	Safari 5.x (new!)

If you haven’t tried our new platform that we told you about in our latest newsletter, you can still give it a try. Don’t miss out on our new features: Ajax support and Heatmaps.

To celebrate this big release we’ve added 100 credits to your account for free.

Recording and Playback technology

We’ve completely reworked the way we do and play back recordings, greatly improving on
the old platform. We’re now capable of recording advanced interactions with your page,
including AJAX requests based on the most popular Javascript framework – jQuery.

Our new recording technology has been designed to be incredibly light and fast,
so that we won’t ruin your speedy website for you visitors.

You can see the new recording/playback technology in action here:

	Ebay.com Quick usability simulation
	Bing.com Quick usability simulation
	BusinessInsider.com Quick usability simulation

See also
- Quick usability study demo
- Task usability test demo

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are one of the next big features we’re working on and where we’ll add a lot more improvements in the future.
A heatmap is an image of your website with some of the regions being marked, depending on how much they’re used.

We can currently generate Clickmaps – heatmaps that display where users click on your website. Clickmaps are a great way to see which features of your site people use and which are invisible to them. We generate heatmaps based on your regular recordings at no additional cost. Just create a new project, record some users and you’ll also get a heatmap. Heatmap is included in your projects! Try it out.

We plan on adding even more types of heatmaps, so that we can give you insights on how people use your website.

Give our new platform a try and tell us how you feel about it.

Regards,
the GhostRec team

What is Task usability test?

• Is a test an advanced usability test with tasks / goals
• Select some tasks you wan’t to see fulfilled
• Invite some users, through a link on your homepage, social media or email
• Watch recordings of users trying to fulfill your tasks. See if they succeed or not and get valuable data.

Try the Task usability test demo

Have you tried the Task usability test?

Task usability test is an advanced test were you setup tasks/goals for a selected group of people to fulfill. You could either invite random people from your website, or through an email. There are really no limitations. Watch and learn how your selected group tries to fulfill your selected tasks on your homepage. This gives you very valuable usability information on how to increase the usability on your homepage. Read more about Task usability tests here.

GhostRec is now on Twitter!

Follow us for the latest news, updates and campaigns. http://twitter.com/ghostrec_com

The future in 2011

We are currently in the late stage of developing a lot of new exiting features that will be launched in the begging of 2011. We are sure they will blow your mind, and make all your usability dreams come true.

We would also like everyone to have a merry Christmas, and a happy usability improving New Year!

Best regards,

GhostRec.com Team