Likelihood to Recommend If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information. The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material. The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze. The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case. The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else. Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content. Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history. In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never encountered any problems
Read full review Performance MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
Read full review Perfectly fine. Never had any problems.
Read full review Support Rating It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box
Read full review Taking a long time 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.
Read full review Online Training Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
Read full review Implementation Rating Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon
Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used
Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with
Zendesk Read full review The package we have limits the number of people who can set up tests. This prevents us from scaling the use of the platform.
Read full review Return on Investment Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality. Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly. Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers. Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots