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UserTesting--Great but has some limitations
December 01, 2020

UserTesting--Great but has some limitations

Linda Borghesani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with UserTesting

We use UserTesting to get quick feedback from both our competitors and our prospects. It is a great way to test prototypes or our live app on both desktop and on mobile platforms. The participant panel is one of the best features and gives us access to people we might not have found on our own. The user research team are the primary users of UserTesting, but we are trying to get designers and product owners to also use the tool with our oversight. More and more designers and product owners are coming to the research team to get quick feedback, which can help to drive their design rather than making guesses. Having data to support design decisions makes us feel much more confident before releasing a redesign or getting feedback on a conceptual design or adding new functionality to our product.
  • Unmoderated usability testing--gets feedback really quickly on designs and allows me to easily change and iterate to make sure we are headed in the right direction.
  • Mobile app testing--allows me to see the customers using our app live rather than in a test environment. Running some studies as scripted vs. explorational has been really useful.
  • Recruiting prospects--this has always been a challenge and there seem to be a good set of panelists who are small business owners.
  • Video Recording is simple--you don't need to remember to press record; it happens automatically, and you can then view the tasks for each session separately to make it easy to analyze results.
  • Video clip highlights--makes it really easy to add clips to presentations. No more excuses not to include video clips!
  • Good customer support--very responsive and helpful!
  • Reporting is weak. The Excel spreadsheets that can be downloaded are cumbersome to use and the questions don't translate well to quickly summarize the data.
  • You can create a library of screener questions, but I'd also like the capability to create a library of study questions.
  • Limited capability to copy a study to a different study type, for instance I can only copy if I am creating a similar study type.
  • Limited search capability, which seems to be getting worse. I had added tags so I could find studies/participants, but this is no longer working.
  • Needs to allow for more/better formatting for questions. I want to be able to highlight important information and the HTML tags do not always display properly even though I am only using supported commands.
  • Needs a the capability to preview for mobile studies.
  • Faster feedback and allowing more iterations than we might normally have
  • Allows us to make informed decisions based on user research, which hopefully will be a cost savings since we get it right the first time, but it is difficult to assign a KPI or ROI
  • Allows us to run more studies than we could without it, especially the recruiting and unmoderated studies and mobile studies.
Support has been great. They are very responsive and helpful, although I do still have some outstanding issues that I am waiting for a response on. I feel like they do care and are trying to help me be successful.
  1. For a tool that is used for usability, I feel there can be some improvements!
  2. New features are often hard to find and functionalities that I do use everyday seem to have a learning curve, such as finding a video clip. I really want to be able to filter and be able to find these more easily.
  3. Search needs to be improved. I used to be able to search all text entered in the summary field and this is no longer available.
  4. Better reporting! Needs to format the Excel downloads and/or provide summary information in the tool.
  5. Needs to allow me to copy questions between study types--similar to Qualtrics, where I can copy anything from any study or block.
  • I am able to get data back quickly, especially if it is from A/B testing two designs to see if there is a design preference and why
  • I am able to find prospects
  • I am able to help my design and product teams make informed designs and provide insights for future development
  • I am able to get quick feedback on future design concepts
  • I am able to test competitor products
  • I can watch people use our product live on their own computers or mobile devices
We have evaluated other tools including Validately, Loop11, LookBack, UserZoom. Some have more features and capabilities, but UserTesting seems to have the best user panel. It is also hard to switch from a tool, as you lose all the data that lives within the tool. For now we are going to continue to use UserTesting but really don't like their new pricing/plans, including limiting the number of screener questions unless you get the top package.
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.