Ask YC: Review my startup, Userfly

Check it out at http://userfly.com/

In short, Userfly captures actual browsing sessions from real users as if you were looking over their shoulder. What we've found is that watching real users actually use your site can be remarkably insightful, so we built Userfly to accomplish that goal.

There's a screencast that will walk you through the basic functionality. Click on the demo button above it to mess around without having to sign up for an account.

Would love your feedback on the idea and its direction!

Love the concept, could see myself using this. Might recommend a different color scheme (I associate those with Microsoft and XP) and perhaps more polish in general on the design side. Otherwise, very nice.

The screencast is great - I might use this for a project I'm working on. The demo is very useful as well to see exactly what it does and doesn't capture (selecting text).

In the pricing table, does "users per hour" mean the number of sessions that are captured? That's what I took it to mean but I'm not sure.

You should probably put some answers to your FAQs :-)

Very cool idea. I would definitely use something like this. I only noticed 1 small issue: it seems tabbing between input fields doesn't register. As soon as I entered text on the first input, I tabbed to the second textarea and entered text. The video didn't register the second textarea text until I had clicked one of the radio buttons (using Safari 3.1.2 on Leopard 10.5.5)

Perhaps you could also work in goals somehow. This is one of the best things about usability tests--giving users a set of goals to complete and watching how they respond. Maybe offering certain users a chance to take place in the study with X reward?

Also, CrazyEgg (another site for visualizing clicks but implemented as a heatmap) lets you run campaigns, which is extremely useful. Considering you generally want to run tests like this after you've made changes, having a set limit is a good idea (10 hours, 100 users, etc...).

One small critique, I got bored with the video and went straight for the demo. I'd suggest making the video shorter or somehow showing "the goods" up-front.

Very nice idea and good implementation.

That's exactly right. One user per hour means a single session. And, that seems like a good candidate for the first FAQ :)

Thank you!