Lookback vs. Maze vs. Optimizely Feature Experimentation

Best suited to conduct remote interviews that are moderated and facilitated by the interviewer/researcher.

Not the best if you want to do it unmoderated, there are much more sophisticated tools out there. Unfortunately, for a design research team that does both these kids of research, it can be hard to get budgets to get two softwares and hence the Unmoderated Feature can seem super undercooked and doesn’t really do the job.

Otherwise it’s a great tool

Incentivized

Maze User Testing is great if you're interested in doing user research from the comfort of your own desk. You can easily setup usability tests, surveys, card sorting and tree tests among other things to get a better understanding of how customers use your product. The only limitation at the moment with Maze that I can identify is only being able to do unmoderated tests, so if you'd like to be able to ask follow up questions in the moment, Maze is not the tool for you.

Incentivized

Based on my experience with Optimizely Feature Experimentation, I can highlight several scenarios where it excels and a few where it may be less suitable. Well-suited scenarios: - Multi-Channel product launches - Complex A/B testing and feature flag management - Gradual rollout and risk mitigation Less suited scenarios: - Simple A/B tests (their Web Experimentation product is probably better for that) - Non-technical team usage -

Incentivized

• Organization of user interviews
• Sharing of interviews across the team
• Creating highlights of insights

Incentivized

• Reporting is top-tier with filtration, heatmaps, user data, and public URLs for stakeholders
• Figma integration with user testing software is about as fast as it gets
• The experience for testers is practically seamless going from our site to a Maze. Loads of completed Mazes.

• It is easy to use any of our product owners, marketers, developers can set up experiments and roll them out with some developer support. So the key thing there is this front end UI easy to use and maybe this will come later, but the new features such as Opal and the analytics or database centric engine is something we're interested in as well.

Incentivized

• Unmoderated interviews is still under cooked as a feature
• The process of how participants have to download an app to start an interview is a large friction point for us

Incentivized

• Sometimes Maze breaks the responsiveness of our product
• Also the analytics is not very useful for us. We do manual walkthrough of products
• Few testers that we hire does not read the instructions very well and will abandon the flow

Incentivized

• Would be nice to able to switch variants between say an MVT to a 50:50 if one of the variants is not performing very well quickly and effectively so can still use the standardised report
• Interface can feel very bare bones/not very many graphs or visuals, which other providers have to make it a bit more engaging
• Doesn't show easily what each variant that is live looks like, so can be hard to remember what is actually being shown in each test

Incentivized

Competitive landscape

Incentivized

Once you understand how the interface works, it works great, but there is a learning curve

Incentivized

Maze is easy to use most of the times. It is easy to integrate with Figma, It is easy to find testers worldwide with required filters. Maze gives recorded videos which are helpful in debugging and understanding the problem with flows. A/B testing is easy to add and test. Overall Maze is very easy to use

Incentivized

Easy to navigate the UI. Once you know how to use it, it is very easy to run experiments. And when the experiment is setup, the SDK code variables are generated and available for developers to use immediately so they can quickly build the experiment code

Incentivized

Any issues that presented themselves were dealt with in a quick and efficient manner and fully rectified by the knowledgeable team over at Maze.

Incentivized

Support was there but it was pretty slow at most times. Only after escalation was support really given to our teams

Incentivized

It’s straightforward. Docs are well written and I believe there must be a support. But we haven’t used it

Incentivized

Zoom was way more expensive and it o is designed to other things apart from just running qualitative interviews. It also requires a different kind of approval and different approval processes to go through when trying to get it simply for qualitative research purposes.

Lookback records, scribes, helps observe and provides a sentiment check as well in the price that it does

Incentivized

A Lookback is an alternative option if you think Maze User Testing is quite expensive for you, but look back has a different approach to Maze User Testing. Lookback focuses on qualitative usability testing instead of quantitative UserTesting. And also, Maze User Testing has a free option but Lookback doesn't have it, but Lookback has a cheaper option at $19/month than Maze.

Incentivized

When Google Optimize goes off we searched for a tool where you can be sure to get a good GA4 implementation and easy to use for IT team and product team. Optimizely Feature Experimentation seems to have a good balance between pricing and capabilities. If you are searching for an experimentation tool and personalization all in one... then maybe these comparison change and Optimizely turns to expensive. In the same way... if you want a server side solution. For us, it will be a challenge in the following years

Incentivized

had troubles with performance for SSR and the React SDK

Incentivized

• It allows us to understand our customers’ problems in a very team compatible way.

Incentivized

• Easy to run quant test
• Easy to test with large number of people on production
• Easy to run unmoderated competitor studies

Incentivized

• We have a huge, noteworthy ROI case study of how we did a SaaS onboarding revamp early this year. Our A/B test on a guided setup flow improved activation rates by 20 percent, which translated to over $1.2m in retained ARR.

Incentivized