UserTesting

For any unmoderated user testing, it's great. If the study you're running would benefit from moderation, I wouldn't use the user testing UI prompts to replace a real human moderator.

I find UserTesting is great if you are struggling to prove out or establish user research at a company. It is more cost-effective than hiring a full-time UX Researcher and helps speed up the process of testing with users. Before UserTesting we were maybe doing 2-3 tests a quarter and now we do 3-4 a month. It's a flat rate for tests so I do not have to worry about expensing and then getting reimbursed every time I need to run a test. I can run multiple tests a week or even in a day and be charged the same amount.

UserTesting is perfect for organizations that use Agile methodology to launch projects and need results within tight timelines. They also have a ton of templates to choose from so setting up a test is fast and easy. However, one thing they need to implement is allowing participants to do down multiple paths depending on their answers and feedback. For example, if participant x answered a certain way, take them to task B. If participant x answered another way, take them to task C. This multi-path scenario would allow more efficient and holistic usability testing.

Wonderful for qualitative tests and interviews with target customers.
Less helpful for something a bit more on quant side.

Well-suited:

• Want to get quick feedback w/out having to spend a lot of time on study logistics (e.g. recruiting, scheduling, etc.).
• Want to get feedback from a broader range of ppts across the US, from different demog groups, etc.
• Things I've used it for and have been been happy w/ the results: short remote interviews, cognitive pretests of survey questions, usability tests.

Less suited:

• In-depth interviews in which you may want to follow up on comments ppts made.

UserTesting is well suited for any scenarios to which an average consumer can relate and behave as they normally do. For retail/e-commerce, it's particularly helpful when trying to get an understanding of how users browse products, find what they're looking for, evaluate product options, etc. It is less useful for scenarios where the user is asked to simulate a specific experience and not fully invested in the task - for example, anything that simulates an actual purchase, as users aren't spending real money and behaving the way a qualified customer might.

Good for:
1. Talking to consumers, especially in the U.S.
2. Needing immediate feedback on a current experience in production (either yours or another company's).
3. Asking questions that don't require significant follow-ups, given that I use UserTesting primarily for unmoderated research.

Not good for:
1. (In unmoderated use cases) Complex prototypes where a user may dead end.
2. Getting access to business users (though this may have changed).
3. Studies that would usually take 45-60 minutes to complete (unless you want to break things out into multiple studies).

If you just want quick results to help make a product decision, UserTesting is easier than going through the cumbersome recruitment process engaging existing users, scheduling them for user research, and interviewing or conducting usability testing on your own, and recording the results. However, you always have to take the results you get from UserTesting with a grain of salt as the testing conditions aren't really ideal to get a genuine user reaction. It employs professional user testers. These people test products all day every day. So their mindset, behaviour, vocabulary, and reactions are quite different from how a "layperson" user might react to your product.

UserTesting is great for not only testing UI's, but also other challenging scenarios. We have used it to even test our print materials like patient and member statements.

UserTesting is great for scenarios where you need to get feedback from a general audience. If you specifically need to recruit only your own users, you may have more difficulty using their panel. Their panel also tends to skew toward people who have Bachelor's degrees, so if you need a lot of people at lower education levels, you may have trouble using their panel to recruit participants. But the quick turnaround is SUPER helpful and the functionality they have for note-taking is great.

[UserTesting] is well suited when one wants to quickly validate a concept, a prototype but doesn't have access to their audience that easily. It's great for capturing feedback quickly and allowing for the sharing of that feedback (e.g. highlight reels). It's well suited whether one has a digital design to test or even if one only wants to validate a theory, gets some response to an idea.

[UserTesting] isn't that well suited when one wants feedback on physical usability, when one wants to see a user use something in a very particular context.

UserTesting is a great way to find the gaps in your website especially after you have become so familiar with your site that problems aren't always obvious. We've found so many issues that we never even considered to be issues prior to running user tests.

UserTesting is great for:

• Remote usability testing (moderated and unmoderated) and for user interviews
• Not having to do deal with compensation for the participants
• Finding audience members quickly

I haven't really found any reason not to use UserTesting.

UserTesting should be considered on any UX & CX team. It is a very important part of our processes and ensures the changes we make can be tested with users before and after launch to make sure we made the right decisions.

UserTesting is well suited for companies who need to get customer verbatims for their company (either through written or verbal responses) who also need assistance in getting a wide panel of users. UserTesting is not only the industry standard for interviewing users but it's panel of users is so great that most likely, any kind of company will be able to screen UserTesting's userbase to find the right customers they need to interview.

It's good for quick usability insights that can be broadly shared. It's nice for live conversation scheduling, automatic recording, and notetaking.

UserTesting is well suited for:
- testing new software features
- testing new products
- gathering feedback on brand and logos
- gathering input on product concepts

Overall it's a good tool and has great functionality, but it can still be improved and made easier to use. If you are creating something simple, it works best and allows you to get quick feedback, which can help drive decisions. I do like the ability to follow up with participants and most are responsive. I really wish there was improved reporting to make it easier to take the results from the studies and generated summary data. It downloads to an Excel spreadsheet but the formatting doesn't make it easy to summarize the data.
I do like the addition of notes in the downloads so I can see all the data in one place, but it is still time consuming to summarize that data. The Excel spreadsheet should make it easy to analyze the data, not cause me to do manual calculations and recode the data.
I am not too happy with the new pricing plans; they are complicated and make us feel like we are being nickel-and-dimed. For instance, charging to use our own participants (whom we pay) seems excessive and unnecessary.

For quick turnaround times UserTesting offers one of the best platforms on the market. Especially to recruit, conduct and analyze data from interviews.

It is not as effective when one is trying to recruit complex demographics as their screeners do not allow for logic. Their unmoderated testing tool for deploying and testing mobile apps can also be a hit or miss depending on robustness of your prototype.

UserTesting is very appropriate for prototype testing, iterative design testing, benchmarking studies (e.g., comparing functionality of two websites or designs), unmoderated interviews, moderated interviews and any study where you need few respondents. I would not use UserTesting for concept testing or anything where I need more quantitative results, but that is not its intended use so I don't think that's a ding on UT.

Testing websites or demo sites has been easy using UserTesting. Participants are recruited quickly so that tests can take place within the same week. We are able to have UserTesting moderators or do the facilitating ourselves and get great results. We have also shared marketing materials for participants to read over and get feedback that way since it is live and the conversation tools used have been successful.

It works well for quick, iterative studies. We use UserTesting for basic usability studies, to understand how users interact with our sites and some preference testing. It's not as good for gathering deep insights on customer needs and motivations. It really good for testing with English speakers, but they have limited global reach and the tool does not support testing in many different languages.

Testing UX flows and prototypes, apps and websites. We haven't tried the moderating testing feature because the plan is a bit cost-prohibative.