Essential Part of my UX Stack
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
UserTesting is used both for moderated customer interviews/usability testing as well as for unmoderated testing of new digital experiences with people in UserTesting's testing network that meet our prospect profile.
Pros
- Great for recruiting testers with a very specific profile
- Text transcription of user feedback
- Flags feedback with positive/negative sentiments
- Easy to create highlight reels around a particular question, etc.
- Summary of ratings/rankings are handy
Cons
- Would like the ability to move a participant from one test to another. Test 2 was an exact replica of Test 1 (I needed to make a dupe bc something went wrong, can't recall exactly what it was) and it was a pain to have to manually look at both tests to compile the final answers.
- Ability to do a comparison test within a comparison test. Once I wanted to test elements within 2 designs- 2 versions of a banner vs 2 versions of a chart. Balanced comparisons only compare 2 things, and don't let you follow up with that same group of testers to ask them to compare another thing within the winning design they first chose.
- A year or so ago I struggled a lot with getting testers who don't have a good mastery of the English language, as a result their feedback was often not useful "I like it. It is good." I have not had this problem in at least a year. Not sure how UserTesting has been able to screen for this...if they've found a way to determine the level of articulation when a new person is signing up?
- Stalls with getting a test completed. Sometimes it takes a very long time to get participants. UserTesting has said my screener is too specific, but if I make a dupe of the test and re-run it with fresh participants, then they come in.
Likelihood to Recommend
UserTesting has been great for moderated customer interviews/usability testing as well as for unmoderated testing of messaging, imagery, prototypes and live experiences. I would say that the scope of what you want needs to be limited, as the participants are only paid so much and tests are supposed to not exceed a certain amount of time. For customer interviews, I think it can be difficult to onboard customers to UserTesting if they have never used it before. If I set up interviews, I don't even have them use the UserTesting scheduling tool, I actually set up all the interviews with the customers myself through the tool (being mindful of time zones!). When we run the meeting, they really don't even know UserTesting is involved. Might be nice for UserTesting to allow the upload/connecting to of a Zoom interview and let it do the transcription/analysis from there.
