I read an interesting article today from the Conversion Rate Experts blog that mentioned a website called UserTesting.com. Here is the pitch:

Find out why people leave your website. Statistics tell you where people leave your site. User testing tells you why. Unfortunately user tetsing has been too expensive for most websites. Until now.  

 As a client of USerTesting.com you get to determine the demographic that you want tested and how many users you want tested. The site contacts testers in that range and they go you website and record their screen and voice as they use it. You get a Flash video for each test that shows the user’s mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and spoken comments.You also get a written transcript with users thoughts and what they liked, didn’t like, and what would cause them to leave. At $19 a pop you will save a lot of time and money by using something like this instead of a “professional tester” or even running in-house tests that would cost anywhere from $50-$100 per test subject.As a business concept it seems pretty solid and as a designer I could myself using this in future to save me some of the headaches that user testing always seems to bring.