There are two flavors of remote usability testing: moderated (using a facilitator and screensharing app) and unmoderated (tasks are administered by a testing platform, without a facilitator.

One reason why unmoderated remote usability testing tends to be more popular than moderated testing is that it’s seen as cheaper and faster. While unmoderated might save some money and time, it may not be as much as you think — and it could come at the expense of findings. We compare typical costs for each type of study.

Factors that Impact Study Costs

Two of the biggest factors that influence the cost of your study is who your participants are and how they will be recruited. Monetary costs will increase if your user population is very busy, rare, or affluent — in those cases, you'll probably need to offer higher incentives. Similarly, if you hire a recruitment agency to find and schedule your users, you might pay a much higher per-recruit fee than you would if you used a participant panel.

These estimates for time and money assume that a research practice is already established in your organization. Expect a study to take longer than our estimates if:

• Stakeholders or clients must be first convinced that the research is needed.
• Clear research goals have not yet been defined.
• The researchers are unfamiliar with the tools used during testing and must spend time learning them.
• Participants are difficult to find and schedule.

Our time estimates also do not include the time required to design and build the product or prototype to be tested.

Additionally, our high estimate for an unmoderated platform subscription is $100 per month. Organizations can spend much more than that depending on the tool. Some large platforms with lots of features and tools (like UserZoom) can cost thousands of dollars per month.

We include costs for a video-conferencing application, but you may not need to include it in your own cost calculations. Ideally, you might be running many studies over time, so that cost is amortized across projects. Also, for moderated studies, your organization is very likely to already have a video-conferencing app for other purposes, so that isn’t a new cost specific to the study. You may choose not to include that aspect when calculating your costs.

Study Estimates

These are rough estimates for a typical 5-participant qualitative usability study conducted in the United States. You’ll likely find that costs vary in different locations, particularly the required incentives.

Usability testing is an immensely flexible and versatile tool, so different variations (such a quantitative usability testing, which requires 20–40 participants), will have different costs.

Table 1: Typical Cost Estimates for a Remote Moderated Study in the US

Typical costs for a remote moderated study in the United States. On the low end, a moderated study for 5 participants might cost around $415 plus 32 researcher hours. On the high end, with high recruitment fees and big incentives, it might cost around $1,680 and 48 hours.

Table 2: Typical Cost Estimates for a Remote Unmoderated Study in the US

Typical costs for a remote unmoderated study in the United States. On the low end, an unmoderated study for 5 participants might cost around $250 plus 11 researcher hours. On the high end, with high recruitment fees and big incentives, it might cost around $1,250 and 27 hours.

Unmoderated Can Have Hidden Costs

Based on these rough estimates, you might expect an unmoderated study to cost anywhere from 20% to 40% less than a moderated equivalent. Your researchers might also save around 20 hours of time.

But remember, there are tradeoffs associated with using unmoderated instead of moderated testing. 

If you’re using an unmoderated-testing platform’s panel, you might be at higher risk of cheaters or “professional” participants — people who just want to get paid and move on or who participate in studies on a regular basis. You might have to remove those participants and replace them. Some platforms have good policies on replacing lackluster participants at no cost to the researcher, but others don’t. To be safe, we typically recommend overrecruiting a bit. So instead of testing 5 participants in an unmoderated study, you might want to test 6.

Researchers often prefer unmoderated testing because they feel it will save them time — no need to run the sessions. But remember, particularly in qualitative testing, you should still be watching those recordings to analyze them. You might find that whatever time you’ve saved in conducting the session  will be shifted into the analysis phase of the project.

Notice a big difference between the two estimates above — the moderated sessions are planned as 60-minute sessions, while the unmoderated sessions are 20 minutes. That’s because most testing platforms have short limits on how long sessions can run. For this reason, long, complex tasks may not be well suited to unmoderated testing.  And if you are planning to test many tasks on the same site, you may need to recruit more participants (with each participant doing only a subset of the tasks).

And finally, remember that the core difference between moderated and unmoderated testing is the presence or absence of a facilitator. A facilitated session often results in more focused sessions and more insights than an unfacilitated one, and that’s something that you might miss in unmoderated testing.

Consider All Costs

Unmoderated testing can be a great option for teams with limited resources. While moderated testing can be slightly more expensive, that cost might be worth the insights to some teams. 

Just make sure you consider all the specifics of your situation (tools, schedule, users, and recruiting) and weigh those against your research goals when you make your choice.

For more help planning and conducting remote studies, check out our full-day seminar, Remote Usability Testing.