YouEye is your eye in the sky for cloud-based user-experience testing

Ever wanted to watch people as they browse your website to figure out what’s working for them — and what’s not?

YouEye does just that, and today it closed $3 million for its unique approach to usability testing it describes as “UX in the cloud.” Angel investors include Saba Software CEO Bobby Yazdani, software engineer Brian McClendon, and Iranian engineer Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi.

The startup claims that customers such as Airbnb, Microsoft, and Eventbrite use its service. Customers are using the technology to watch testers browsing their websites through webcam, and they can listen in to any feedback.

CEO Kyle Henderson got the idea when he listened in to a presentation from a company that had started using eye-tracking technology to study onsite behavior. The results were extremely helpful, but the the price was well over $40,000 for several months. Henderson was determined to create a cheaper version of this technology for companies of all sizes to use.

YouEye’s secret is its “emotion recognition” functionality — the engineering team has compiled a dataset of 50,000 microexpressions and can pinpoint when visitors to your site are happy, surprised, confused, sad, or disgusted.

Got a target market in mind? Customers can request a specific type of tester by demographic factors like age range, gender, education level or income. Another option is to Insite, a new feature released today. By incorporating a line of code, customers can ask any visitor to their site to participate in a usability study, and then capture the full video and audio if they opt in.

Prices start at $39 per participant, and customers can expect to get a full run-down of usability results within 48 hours.