Spend research time doing research - not recruiting
October 31, 2020
Spend research time doing research - not recruiting
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with UserTesting
UserTesting is used by our Digital Team to influence decisions across the organization - specifically within Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. UserTesting is used to get feedback on the value of potential digital projects, identify the best solution to customer problems, competitive research, and to improve the usability of public-facing websites and customer-facing portals.
- Creating tests
- Sharing insights
- Scaling research through templates
- Organizing tests
- Robust review process (e.g., legal review, product manager review)
- Variety of question types
- Ability to use for survey / quantitative research
- Reduced time / money spent in recruiting costs
- Increased the amount of research able to be completed within a sprint
- Identified major errors / usability bugs that would have been costly to conversion rates
We've used customer insights to bring a lot of benefits to our organization. First, it has improved organizational empathy for a particular group of customers or for customers in a particular experience. Secondly, it has allowed us to move with greater speed and confidence in decision making (and to include a customer-centric POV during the design and development of key features). Finally, customer insights has helped build alignment across various teams and rally the organization around a clear picture of an issue.
We compared UserTesting with a few tools, most notably UserZoom. UserTesting was selected for the simpler price structure (one annual, flat fee) vs. the pay-per-play of UserZoom. UserTesting also stood out in the thought leadership space and new features like the ability to recruit from an internal list of customers are additional distinctives.
Using UserTesting
4 - We all work in our IT Department as part of the Digital Team supporting our marketing and customer service organizations.
2 - Currently we have two people actively supporting UserTesting. One person (myself) supports the user management side (e.g., creating accounts, giving basic training, creating templates for tests, etc.) another person supports our SSO and provisioning process from the IT security side. Neither of us are fully dedicated to the UserTesting project and it accounts for a very small portion of our overall time.
- Getting usability feedback on prototypes and concepts
- Validating which option, among many, works best for customers
- Comparative research to see how we rank against competitors
- Getting user requirements for a project up-front
- Benchmarking existing user experience and re-indexing those benchmarks after making improvements
- To test the comprehension of print materials
- To have customers show us the non-digital experience (e.g., using a product, showing their living space, etc.)
- To recruit for information architecture or surveys
- To recruit from our own customer base vs. a general population audience
- To recruit for more quantitative research methods
Evaluating UserTesting and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
The most important qualification for us was both pricing as well as the breadth of the user base that we could poll in UserTesting. We needed to find a vendor who had a broad enough audience to fit our various recruitment segments and receive feedback in a timely manner. UserTesting fit those requirements and had a lot of feature-adds that, while we didn't initially ask for them, definitely made them stand out from competitors.
Not a lot that I would change. I feel happy with our decision for UserTesting and we have consistently renewed our contract for 3 years.
UserTesting Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - For us, the change management was minimal. We were not using any tool like this before, so it replaced a manual recruitment process that no one within the organization liked. So all of the change was welcome!
- Legal and security approval to collect PII within the tool
- Enabling SSO
- Working with compliance to enable a digital consent form / NDA.
UserTesting Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No - So far, we haven't found a need for premium support. Any issue we raise gets acknowledged and resolved quickly and issues are very infrequent.
We were once a participant in a beta program for a feature. The feature was still being worked on and there wasn't a lot of documentation available. One of the primary developers for the feature was extremely responsive via email to help me get the feature enabled and working for my setup. It was clear that he was highly knowledgeable and actually the person working on the feature. Was great to be able to have that kind of connectivity to the company and we got an issue resolved in two days that, in my opinion, could easily have taken 2 months with the more traditional support system (e.g., where your request goes to a generic inbox and then gets passed around to different people to try and find an answer). Was a wonderful experience and felt like UserTesting was really committed to my personal success.
Using UserTesting
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Test creation
- Screener creation
- Annotating / exporting video clips from studies
- Creating highlight reels can be cumbersome
- Previewing a test