betterstories.tech
Async video-based usability testing
- Web app
- Screen + camera recording
- No signup
Skills
- MediaRecorder API
- Canvas Compositing
Makers post a task, real people record screen and camera on their own time, and the replays are waiting the next morning.
Challenge
Moderated usability testing is the thing small teams know they should do and almost never do. Every session costs a calendar invite, a facilitator sitting through it live, and a participant recruited and paid. So the research either doesn't happen, or it happens once before launch and never again. What was missing was a way to watch a real person struggle with your product without anyone having to be in the room.
Action
I designed and built betterstories as a Next.js app around one hard technical piece: the recorder composites the participant's shared screen with their camera as a circular picture-in-picture onto a single canvas, mixes microphone and tab audio, and records that as one stream, so the maker gets a single clip instead of files to reassemble. Three test types cover different questions: a task test for behaviour, a three-second test for first impressions, and an open opinion question. Delivery matters as much as capture, so a test ships either as a hosted link or as a one-line embed script that fires an invite popup on the maker's own live site, rendered in a Shadow DOM so it can never inherit or break the host page's styles, with page targeting and a per-visitor frequency cap so it asks once and never nags. Participants stay anonymous with no signup, and recordings upload straight to object storage.
Result
The embed is the part that changes the practice rather than just the tooling: because the invite fires on real traffic, the people being tested are actual visitors with genuine intent, not recruited participants performing a task. Feedback is tagged against one shared vocabulary across every test, so signals accumulate into themes over time instead of sitting in unconnected session recordings.