If only I could use Optimizely to test this title - they make it so easy!
August 10, 2015

If only I could use Optimizely to test this title - they make it so easy!

George McMullen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Other

Modules Used

  • Mobile, iOS, Android

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely

Optimizely is used as a critical piece of understanding and testing user behavior by product, design, marketing, and engineering groups. It is used in multiple ways, from quick tests to see how users interact with buttons, hero images, promotional text, to test out operational changes and feature roll-outs, all the way to quantifying and proving hypotheses from in person user tests, surveys, and other qualitative data. From a platform perspective, Optimizely is used for web, mobile web, and mobile apps (iOS and Android). It's helpful to have a single platform for all your testing needs across different platforms as the teams already have enough other tools that are used on a daily basis to manage projects and analyze results.

Pros

  • When we started implementing Optimizely on mobile (iOS and Android), the team at Optimizely was particularly helpful in working with the engineers and product team. This really accelerated the process for us to dive in and get started using the product.
  • The Optimizely team seems very passionate about helping their customers get the most out of their platform. They are always available to answer an e-mail, support request, forum post, jump on a phone call and even come by for a visit. On the flip side, they are always asking for feedback on the product, which provides a sense that we are working with a living, breathing company.
  • Optimizely has spent a lot of time understanding the intricacies of multivariate testing and statistical analysis and made it dead simple to see the results in their product. Even if your focus isn't around data, you can plainly see how your experiments are performing and focus on what you are best at. If you want to learn more, they've provided a lot of resources to help you understand concepts like statistical significance.

Cons

  • I'd like to see more APIs to be able to export data and integrate it ina data warehouse so that we could perform our own analytics.
  • Sometimes it's not obvious how long an experiment will need to run based on a product's existing traffic. Having an estimate integrated directly into the experiment would be very helpful.
  • Sometimes I am concerned that they've made things too simple to get in and start running experiments, without having proper constructs on what experiments you should be running and what you are actually testing. Just because you've seen results on testing a button in an early stage of a funnel does not mean your end conversion is going to change.
  • There is a definite positive impact on ROI and we use it primarily to help us with that.
  • Having a platform do the work for us helps us focus on what we do best - build a great consumer product! Don't think that you've got everything under control and can build it yourself, because you're not in the business of building an optimization platform.
  • LeanPlum,Apptimize,Mixpanel
One of Optimizely's biggest pluses is that it works on multiple platforms, which many other products do not. Another major factor was their evangelization not just of their product, but of conversion rate optimization and statistical relevance in general. Finally, when speaking with them, they didn't so much try to sell their product as they spoke to how it could integrate into our overall workflow.
It's great for doing both quick tests on UI/UX and for more involved tests that you've designed and experimented with on a qualitative basis. On both web and native mobile apps, it works flawlessly. From a mobile perspective, the team at Optimizely was incredibly helpful in getting us up and running. I do get a little concerned about the way it swizzles the UI elements when running simple UX/UI tests and have found some limitations in that, but for the most part I am running more advanced tests to begin with anyway.

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