Applause headquartered in Framingham in Massachusetts offers application testing services.
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UserTesting
Score 8.1 out of 10
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UserTesting aims to enable every organization to deliver the best customer experience powered by human insight. The vendor states that with UserTesting’s on-demand Human Insight Platform, companies across industries can make accurate customer-first decisions at every level, at the speed business demands.
Tester skill and experience is varied so it's important for the project manager to properly understand your requirements. The better they can build a team to suit your needs, the better your results will be. This will require a number of test cycles and fine tuning to get it right. It also fares better with consumer applications which are designed for the "common" user. For example, if you have a niche product designed for businesses, this type of testing may not be a good fit.
It's the best for A/B tests or tests where you need a broad audience. If you don't need a real niche audience (that you should recruit then rather yourself), then you can rely on UserTesting. It's good because it's so quick, almost instant, it takes about 10 minutes on average before I can start reviewing and documenting sessions.
Taking notes with video clips. I can take notes while I am watching a session and I can create clips of UX issues or bugs occurring. This really helps when I share them with other teams.
Exporting all your notes. I analyze all usability tests by exporting my notes from UserTesting. I wish I could bulk export multiple tests though.
Setting up demographics. This helps me reach out to users who are similar to our audience.
Setting up screeners. Some studies require specific audiences (using a specific tool etc.), by setting screeners I can make sure I reached the correct audience.
In using MBM (Mobile Beta Management), it would be better to have the surveys be based on completion of a specific task instead of time or number of app access. This might be a little more complex to set up, but would be well worth it.
A "stakeholder management" view would be nice to allow those not normally using the tool to get a quick status of testing.
A "stakeholder management" view for MBM would be nice to allow those not normally using the tool to get a quick status of progress and user feedback.
The organization of the work spaces/dashboards could use some work.
I don't feel as supported as I used to from a customer success perspective. I used to have dedicated, go-to professionals to reach out to about my account who knew my project context, account history, etc. Recently we've been pushed into general support pools, and it doesn't feel like my account gets any personalized attention anymore.
I would like to see a more refined experience for collaborators - the test plans I share with them are plain text/hard to read.
Would be nice to be able to conduct focus groups using this tool.
The one missing point is for the price - it's quite expensive to maintain the service to the extent of how we use it (dozens of test cycles and hundreds of test case hours on monthly basis). However the benefits still weights the price, especially when thinking of the price of potential hot fixes. Still, the price can be a reason to take a look on how competition is doing.
I'm very happy with my experience of the product and the level of service and learning resources they provide. If the service becomes more expensive than it currently is then we might not be able to justify additional cost - but this is theoretical. I would recommend UserTesting and would ideally renew our contract.
The UI and the whole app is updated on regular basis, quite often actually. There are some cool features, like integration with several other bug tracking tools, which makes the bug management really easy. However there are some key usability issues within some of the less used workflows, which brings the score down a bit. They need to work on better switching between products and better bug search, especially across purchased products.
User Testing is very easy to use. You first select the profile of your participants. This is as simple as checking on checkboxes and creating some questions to target the right market and user. You may also just send the tests to your own customers with a simple link. After selecting your audience, you just need to drag and drop the tasks and set them up. You're always guided throughout the process and if you're missing something, the user testing platform will let you know. Really simple stuff.
I know the score doesn't really correspond with my earlier answers, but I have really special relationship with the Applause people. I don't really go through official support. I rather use my internal connections to make my request handled as soon as possible - and it works really well! I don't need to go through the official channels. And it's known that the unofficial ones are much more effective. I can confirm!
When we had issues or questions, it often took a long time to receive a response from the support team. This delayed our testing and caused frustration for our team.
Not helpful in our specific questions
When we did receive a response, it often did not fully address our specific questions or issues. This made it difficult to resolve problems or move forward with our testing.
I didn't need to be involved at all. It was seamless from our perspective. All products were inserted in by Vendor, only Test Cycles we needed to insert ourselves initially. Now even that is handled by Vendor. The only thing we need to pay attention now is - to request cycles at the right time and review the bugs found during the test cycles. Nothing else. Very good experience!
From a technical perspective, the implementation was extremely smooth. Most of the change management / implementation hurdles were clearing use of the tool through our various security, legal, and information privacy teams. Once these concerns were addressed (UserTesting.com was very helpful in providing all the needed documentation), the implementation process was very simple and we were able to get going right away.
By the time we signed the contract, there was no competition to Applause (back in time the company was called uTest). Ever since, we didn't evaluate anyone else because we built a very close relationship, which works for both sides. I think Applause is the furthest in building the test community
UserTesting allows for a quicker recruiting process for our studies. Additionally, UserTesting has more unmoderated research features and capabilities. I think that their payment model is also easier than UserInterviews. We typically user UserTesting for reaching our hard to reach segments and recruiting prospective users not already within our product user population.
- we were able to provide good QA on an increased number of deliverables in a shorter period of time.
- great interaction with the Applause team, test leads and others
- high quality candidates added to our team
Negative
- the contract model (based on number of projects for specified monthly periods) was a little tricky for our development life cycles and left us at times wanting to engage test cycles but unable to do so while simultaneously having a project sitting idle for weeks after test cycles completed. Our business model was not a great fit for the contract model.
Cost savings of over $100K as we dont involve our research vendors as much as we used to do in the past
Better tested experience get out in the market quickly even when we don't have enough time available with our researchers; our designers who are well-trained on usertesting.com can test out quickly
