UserTesting

Best suited for researchers to conduct moderated tests and UX designers to conduct unmoderated tests! Not suited for diary studies!

Most appropriate for:
-Panel recruitment
-Unmoderated usability testing
-Quick tests
-Moderated interviews
-Unmoderated interviews

Less appropriate for:
-Card sorts
-Surveys

UserTesting is great to help designers get validation on their designs to see if they are initiative or user friendly, however it can also determine if a design needs more work if participants have trouble using/understanding it. At my company, we tend to test after ideation and solutioning to help validate which concept to go forward with, but I am hoping in the future we can start testing early on in the ideation phase to help us get enough supporting evidence to determine whether or not we should explore a design further to create a better case with product and tech folks.

UserTesting solves the problem of recruitment. Thanks to UserTesting I can recruit participants from different countries around the world with the characteristics I need. Recruitment is a very difficult process for a small research team and I sometimes still struggle with that; for example, when recruiting minors for research. But not having to do the whole recruitment and reward process is a huge benefit.

UserTesting is a great way to quickly gain user or customer feedback in both generative and evaluative research studies. Want to better understand who your users are but don't have time to be on moderated interviews, UserTesting can help. Want to gain early feedback on design concepts, they can help you there too.

It was a good resource to capture unboxing videos, ab tests, unmoderated usability studies and costumer videos to gain insights and feedbacks on our user experience research studies. It's really easy to share the insights and keep everything in one place. It's good for recruiting from a large-range sample on their own network base saving some time on research operational process.

It just makes it really easy to quickly gather feedback from contributors. For US markets I normally get 10 respondents within 2 hours of launching the study. The turn around time is great in a last minute thinking culture at times. I extensively use use and appreciate the pre-panel filters, super easy and helpful.

UserTesting has been great for usability testing and getting feedback on a prototype/design before putting it into production. It is very helpful to watch how people interact with your design without any bias. When watching the videos, I can easily make comments about the user and my observations for me to go back too.

It is incredibly well suited when you need to get feedback on experiences or products that need quick feedback fast, also well suited when a team needs to continuously iterate and get feedback on a product. It is also well suited when a team needs to conduct discovery research and understand and define customer problems, and be able to talk to customers in real time. It is not well suited for other methodologies like surveys or paper prototyping.

UserTesting allows me and my team to create and complete user tests incredibly quickly and cheaply. User testing used to be incredibly expensive and time consuming and as such wasn’t completed as often as it should have been.

Best suited: low complexity user testing of a prototype or live site. Less appropriate: user tests that are more foundational in nature and require follow up questions, as well as testing complicated flows in prototypes because you can't course correct participants easily.

They are understanding when it comes to missing scheduled appointments and customer service understands my concerns

Really good for getting super-fast feedback to help sense-check that your designs are heading in the right direction. As a default you are able to record the user's face (as well as their screen) which makes for really engaging video recordings to analyse. Verbal feedback is automatically transcribed and there is an automated sentiment feature which helps identify problems to rectify really quickly.

UserTesting is ideal for big companies that work in an agile setting. If you are working in a fast paces environment and need to get some insights fast, UserTesting helps a lot. If you are creative, and know how to ask questions, you would be surprised how fast UserTesting starts to show its value. We are a small team and we try to minimize our work load as much as we can by optimizing our research operations, so making unmoderated tests are very important to us. If you are a small company with limited resources though, it might be expensive. Then, buying multiple tools that cover different areas might actually become more affordable.

Great for observing, hearing, and asking. Bad for getting solid opinions unless you had a lot of people for stats. You cannot act on 5 people casually saying, “I like this over that,” because many times the testers just want to finish the test and give false positives.

UserTesting is really great when you want to get insights on a prototype. You can have participants walk through the prototype and conduct speak out loud so you can hear directly from them on what they like, dislike and any sources of confusion. If you want to be able to probe or have a conversation with users you could recruit through UserTesting but it would like be more efficient and cost saying to use Zoom.

We use UT in all areas of our design and development process.

It's a fantastic platform for remote qualitative interviews, both moderated and unmoderated. It allows you some organizational capabilities with data, but is not sufficient as a repository.

It is good tool to talk to customers of a competitor products and understand the strength and weaknesses
Conduct exploratory research to learn what potential users will need or how to improve a current product
Conduct usability studies and short studied to test certain design ideas and prototypes before commiting to the idea

UserTesting is great for:
Conducting surveys
Video responses
National users
International users

User Testing is not so great for:
Niche user types

Its strength is in usability testing and testing designs with users. Another key strength of UserTesting is its panel. Combined, it's incredible for getting quick feedback on usability. With that said, many of the panel members are used to taking tests and generally more technologically savvy. I've heard many words like intuitive more in testing now. However, I do think if you're focused on watching how people are using designs and are structuring tasks appropriately, you can still learn a lot from people who are familiar with design testing.

With that said, I do not believe UserTesting and any qualitative research should be used solely for validation. It is important to think about sample size and confidence quality. It's not really appropriate for message testing. It also can't present multiple concepts in a randomized order, so I might defer to using a different tool if you're in that stage of design.

For people who have zero experience when it comes to designing a usability test, the UserTesting platform will be a good start as it is beginner friendly. UserTesting platform is quick to learn how the platform works as the interface is minimal, it also provides courses where they give walk new users through the features. However, when it comes to asking the right questions to get a genuine reaction from the participants, new users should learn how to avoid steering participants in a certain direction, causing them to give biased answers.

UserTesting is perfect for landing page reviews, product comparisons, copy editing and focus group work. I set up a multi-varied landing page sequence and had users walk through the different versions of the pages to see which one was the easiest to understand. Hearing feedback on the title copy which was clear to me but not clear to the user helped me realize how I could clarify and simplify my page copy to make sure users can navigate the site knowing what to expect upon signing up.

Honestly, the functionality of this software is one of the best on the market. It does an incredible job of really dialing in on what you want to know and getting access to testers.