Narvar, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their post-purchase oriented customer experience platform, providing shipment tracking, customer pick up options, notifications, and purchase return capabilities and features.
If you're not on a platform that has a branded post-purchase landing page or in-email estimated delivery date script, Narvar provides this experience. It's a nice-to-have for any brand that wants to provide a seamless, branded shopping experience for their customers. Narvar's grown rapidly and it seems they are increasing costs, which may be prohibitive and hard to justify for smaller companies.
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.
Narvar offered us a turn-key solution that we had up and running in less than a month.
Narvar offered several out of the box widgets (solutions) to help build/customize content (calendar view, milestone icons, SMS messaging and personalize content based on items purchased).
Narvar's solution is scalable/expandable to include returns (once we are ready).
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.
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.
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
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.
Once it's set up, it doesn't require much support. We used to have quarterly or bi-annual touch bases with an account person to review our rating and customer usage but haven't heard from them in a while - either because we're too small or they got rid of this interaction. Can't say we miss it though because we can see our rating and feedback, and there is only so much you can do within the confines of the platform without adding on new functionality.
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.
At the time, Narvar had no other competitors to my knowledge. We looked at building this functionality in house which had a 3 month estimate. Everyone involved happily welcomed the tool.
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
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
