MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
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.
UserZoom is well suited for usability testing, I found specifically around test websites and marketing materials. I was able to invite others to participate and watch as well as screen share so that it was an interactive session. Other tools I have used have been a little better with the video output and transcripts of each session so that we could capture notes quickly, but overall it was a good tool to use to test.
Quantitative testing can be done on the cheap compared to other quant tools or vendors... once you buy the license, you only pay for additional recruiting and you are managing the project, so there isn't the high cost of having other vendors doing the project management or running a survey etc.
Farily robust means of tracking and recording data. I also relied heavily on the excel spreadsheet of all the raw data, which you can have UZ customize for you to get what you need.
Great support system from the UserZoom team - they have researchers who can help with coding and also provide research support for a very good price.
Also they have tree testing, card sorting, survey capabilities (in addition to usability testing)... and mobile testing. and they seem to be continously be developing the tool to support additional methods.
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.
Compared with some other tools, because their video conferencing platform is web-based (vs. using Zoom, which has a desktop app), I find the connection buffers a lot and it's kind of annoying
Their screening tool on the UserZoom side (not Go) is clunky. Just let me select May, Must, or Should not for criteria rather than the weird interface design they have now.
Logic panel is a little confusing, sometimes I do a double-take, sometimes it's wonky and resets itself. It's just not as easy to use as it could be.
They haven't integrated UserZoom and UserZoom Go (formerly Validately)
It's expensive!
We signed up for a high sample size license with unlimited tests, but we're finding their panel doesn't fill as fast as their biggest competitor, UserTesting. We've struggled to fill n=100 sample tests with fairly general criteria.
A lot of their licenses only allow limited concurrent studies, whereas UserTesting had unlimited tests that you could launch at a time. It's slowed us down.
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.
I'm actually trying to get a license for my current job at my current company (recently moved to a new company). I gave it this rating because I am about to go to our executive to ask that we purchase it! I know that there will be value because we are forecasting a high volume of research next year
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.
Overall, it was fairly easy to use. Especially if you are familiar with this type of product. We were able to use it for testing pretty much right after we got it (same day) and didn't have many issues figuring out how to invite, test, and share which was great.
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.
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
From my experience, the UserZoom team has really done a great job answering the limited questions we have given them thus far. I think the platform is popular enough that many of my questions have been answered by their help pages - or other online content with helpful tips and tricks. I think the community has done a nice job of providing end-user tutorials for those who are new to the platform.
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.
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
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
Client selected it due to how they used it, pricing, and what it could do for them. It's about the same as these other tools but UsabilityHub let's you run multiple types of task in one test, and UserTesting still has a bigger panel I think
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.
Making informed decisions: repeat testing before launching the app/website to reduce errors in the future
Guarantee customers' satisfaction: ensure the errors are reduced to the minimum so that the purchase process is smooth and there will be no need to reach out to our customer support team
