UserTesting use case guidebook

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With the UserTesting human insights platform, you can get fast feedback from your customers or other audiences to fully understand what people think about your products, your digital experiences and any other interactions they have with your brand. This can reveal problems and challenges you didn’t know existed as well as open up your understanding of new opportunities and improvements to tackle.

By providing a solution that covers unmoderated testing as well as live interviews, targeting our on-demand panel of study participants or your private audiences, the UserTesting platform can support a wide spectrum of use cases across different teams—from UX and Product to Marketing.

This guide has been developed to share some common use cases and stories of how our customers have used UserTesting to gather fast and relevant insights to:

Get started on the right foot

Launch successfully

Drive ongoing wins

Optimize content

Increase customer empathy

These icons, displayed for each use case, will help you understand which are more relevant to your needs according to your role:

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Table of Contents

GET STARTED ON THE RIGHT FOOT

Needs Discovery

More efficient A/B testing

Prototyping

Survey Validation

Mobile App Validation/Design

Customer Journey Mapping

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LAUNCH SUCCESSFULLY

Mobile Validation

Pre-launch

DRIVE ONGOING WINS

Competitive Intelligence

Form and Checkout / Shopping Cart Optimization

Pre/Post Analytics Tools Observation

OPTIMIZE CONTENT

Card Sort / Information Architecture

Site Content Validation & Discovery (SEM/SEO)

Site Design Validation & Discovery

Ad Creative Validation – Messaging and Sentiment

INCREASE CUSTOMER EMPATHY

Customer Check-Ins / Executive Listening Tours

True Voice of Customer

Real World Testing / Capture the Real Experience in Native Settings

Emotional Response from your Customer 17

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GET STARTED ON THE RIGHT FOOTIn the world of software development, there is a saying (seemingly adapted from a quote from architect Frank Lloyd Wright), “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.” In essence, problems can be discovered and easily corrected when in draft format, or they can be forcefully adjusted (at a loss of time and money in the process) when at a more completed stage.

By getting customer and other critical stakeholder feedback early in your process, you gather the data that helps you make more informed decisions when everything is greenfield and focus on the efforts that drive the best outcomes.

NEEDS DISCOVERY

Get to know your customers—what they are looking for and the challenges they face—before you start designing a solution. Having an open-ended conversation gives your customers and other audiences the opportunity to share what’s on their mind— which can give you the inspiration to create compelling and innovative solutions.

Code for America conducted extensive needs discovery of their two customer audiences— probation officers (POs) and individuals on probation or other pre-trial supervision—when designing an improved messaging app. The trial of their ClientComm app saw a 32 percent improvement in pre-trial success and an 8x increase in communications between POs and their clients. Read their story

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MORE EFFICIENT A/B TESTING

When you run an A/B test, you’re pitting two designs against each other to see which one people prefer. However, a research study showed that only one of every eight A/B tests leads to significant change. If you’re constantly running A/B tests without a game plan and failing to see clear winners or get statistically significant results, you should consider getting qualitative feedback before finalizing on designs.

Get direct customer feedback first to hone in on the greatest pain points and areas of opportunity, then A/B test variations to strategically fine tune your experience.

• Generate ideas about what to A/B test. Like needs discovery, get a sense of your customers’ preferences and expectations before narrowing down specific options to A/B test.

• Get qualitative feedback before you A/B test, to ensure that you are in the right “neighborhood” before you hone in on the exact “house.”

• Understand why customers voice a preference for one design or image over another.

TIPS FOR MORE EFFECTIVE A/B TESTING

A major pediatric healthcare system turned to qualitative testing to hone in on the types of website images that resonated with customers. Learning that they preferred pictures of real patients rather than stock photography, the team was able to select the best-of to conduct A/B testing and select the right image.

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PROTOTYPING

It’s critical to validate your ideas and lock down on your designs before you spend cycles building out your product. You don’t want any surprises down the line— like discovering that there’s a pretty basic usability issue after you’ve invested time and money in development, that will require even more time and money to fix.

Getting feedback early in your process allows you to “measure twice, cut once.” Hearing early challenges or confusion on sketches, prototypes or rough ideas helps you understand if you’re headed down the right path and also gives you the opportunity to course-correct without wasting time or resources, or doing expensive rework.

Since your prototypes are not yet live and accessible to the public, here are some ways to share them for testing:

• UserTesting secure prototype hosting allows you to securely upload a HTML prototype (.zip file). With hosting on UserTesting, we restrict access to your prototypes to the testing period only—giving you a layer of security and control over your unreleased designs.

• Upload and host images directly to UserTesting (including PNG and JPG and other file types), for feedback on early sketches, mockups or image ideas.

• The UserTesting plugin for Adobe XD allows you to initiate the process for gathering feedback on your prototype and sketches directly within Adobe XD.

• Share prototypes that you’ve created using third-party tools, including Axure and InVision, by publishing a link and then sharing that URL.

TIPS FOR TESTING PROTOTYPES

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SURVEY VALIDATION

Releasing a poorly designed survey can waste money and invalidate your results. You don’t want to get back responses that are irrelevant or fail to inform next steps because respondents had a different understanding of your questions.

Test the design and questions for comprehension first, ensuring they’re clear and result in the types of responses you are expecting, then release it into the wild.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING

You often hear “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” But do you really understand your customers’ journeys—the challenges that they encounter and the decisions that they make when interacting with your brand?

By observing customers and prospects—from initial perception to final steps in their decision making process—you’re in the passenger’s seat in understanding the customer journey. And these insights can help you generate ideas on what to change to improve everything from awareness to conversion.

MOBILE APP VALIDATION/DESIGN

Designing the next killer app? Get feedback to make sure your app appeals to your target audience. Validate the concept, perfect the first time user experience, and even pre-test app store images and copy to see what drives downloads.

By conducting customer interviews using Live Conversation, Autotrader made a major discovery about their customers’ buying journey. Learning this helped them shed “institutional myths” and re-think content on their webpages.

Read their story to learn more.

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LAUNCH SUCCESSFULLYYou know the moment: everyone’s huddled around, eagerly anticipating the moment that you push the proverbial button and all the months of hard work go live. And if you’re like most folks, you have also gone through the experience where things don’t necessarily go to plan and you’re left scrambling trying to patch up an unforeseen problem.

Ensure go-to-market success by getting feedback prior to launch, whether it’s a new product, feature enhancement, marketing campaign or other project. Get confirmation before you go live, so that you can launch with confidence.

MOBILE VALIDATION

Your web or app can render very differently according to device type, screen size and operating system. Get confirmation based on these criteria to ensure users, across all different technologies, have the same positive experience.

90% of multi-screen users say that they transfer between devices when completing a single task over time

67% of multi-screen users start shopping on one device and continue on another

While doing a diary study of their mobile users, Udemy made an interesting discovery as to why (and also where) learners choose to rely on mobile over other devices.

Read their case study

DIDYOU KNOW?

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PRE-LAUNCH

Whether it’s perfecting your pitch or making sure that your product is something that people will want, buy and can use, UserTesting is a great tool for presenting concepts and ideas to potential customers to get feedback before you go live. Seeing a user struggling with your potential web or mobile experience gives you the much-needed evidence to revisit and revise before you launch.

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Adobe released features that they knew customers wanted but the immediate feedback wasn’t what they expected. Learn how user feedback helped them make updates that better matched customer expectations.

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DRIVE ONGOING WINS Once you’ve released your product or campaign, what do you do? You sit back, relax and enjoy the spoils, right?

Of course not! In today’s fast moving and competitive market, you have to keep moving, iterating and innovating. Gather information to understand your customers’ evolving needs, and to get the 411 on what your competitors are doing, to stay ahead and continue providing what your customers want.

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Are you just dying to know: what is your competitor’s secret sauce? What is giving them the edge?

Our panel of real consumers will give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what’s working for competitors and areas where you may be falling behind. When you understand your competitors’ kryptonite (or their competitive advantage), you can make the improvements that help you surge ahead and win more business.

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FORM AND CHECKOUT / SHOPPING CART OPTIMIZATION

Wondering where customers are getting tripped up, why they are dropping off and why conversions aren’t happening?

By watching a recording of the customer’s screen and hearing them explain why they are making the choices they are, you gain a deeper understanding of customer intent, expectations and the challenges they experience. Insights inform optimizations from start to finish.

The Walmart.ca optimization team needed to align on a method and plan for prioritizing site updates. Read how UserTesting helped the team identify the most impactful digital improvements— improving revenue 13% from improvements on just one page.

PRE/POST ANALYTICS TOOLS OBSERVATION

Many quantitative tools show in aggregate what users are doing on your site. You know what a large audience is doing, but you don’t know why.

By helping you understand how real customers use your site or mobile app, UserTesting provides the true voice of customer that perfectly complements analytics data. You get critical context about the root of the problem to effectively triage and design solutions.

Vistaprint saw a 16% spike in page exits following a website update. But the analytics data alone couldn’t explain why this was happening. Learn how qualitative insights helped them explain why customers were leaving at higher rates and the changes they made to prevent it.

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OPTIMIZE CONTENT

Content that is clear, interesting, conveys a point and is well organized is more likely to be consumed. You’ve made it this far in this use case ebook so you really can’t disagree.

Whether it’s a marketing campaign or in-product messaging, it’s critical to provide the right content experiences to engage and educate customers, to encourage expected behaviors or workflows.

CARD SORT / INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Just as a new building needs a strong foundation and a logic to its layout, the same is true for the presentation of your ideas and concepts.

Whether you’re redesigning a complex web or mobile application or curating website content for prospective buyers, get insight on optimizing information architecture, so that you are effectively guiding customers through layers of information to ensure an optimal workflow or a customer journey that ends in conversion.

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SITE DESIGN VALIDATION & DISCOVERY

Just as the actual content on your website matters, equally important is the layout and display of that information. Putting too much or not enough can result in feast or famine.

Get customer reactions to understand how much information is enough to effectively compel audiences, to optimize the design and layout according to their needs and preferences.

AD CREATIVE VALIDATION – MESSAGING AND SENTIMENT

The best ads capture the human experience and touch customers at an intellectual and emotional level. And the worst? Well the worst ads are created based on a misguided understanding of how to connect with customers and often end up dissected and derided on social media.

Get feedback on whether your ads resonate with your target audiences before you launch. Ensure that the response you’re expecting is the response that you get.

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The largest pediatric health system in a major US metropolis leaned on UserTesting to optimize page layouts for a site redesign. They performed a series of tests to confirm the right site design and departments that transitioned to the new page layout increased conversions at 361% the rate of non-transferred departments.

They also learned the type of imagery that patients prefer on the website, which helped them conduct more focused A/B testing to select imagery that set the right mood and tone.

Read more.

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SITE CONTENT VALIDATION & DISCOVERY (SEM/SEO)

Presenting easy to find, compelling and relevant content—and in the moment that customers are searching for it—is key to communicating your product and brand’s worth and convincing customers to choose your offerings.

With qualitative feedback, alongside other analytics data you may be using, you can better understand the ideas and topics your customers are looking for to inform your content strategy.

When it comes to content and other experiences, a group of Accenture researchers concluded that today’s consumers are no longer as receptive to loyalty programs and other measures employed to drive loyalty. Instead, consumers seek out brands that are highly relevant to their needs in every moment that a need is present.

Read our ebook, “Relevance, The Marketer’s New Secret Weapon” to learn why tailoring content experiences to the needs of your customers is key.

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A B2B software reviews company wanted to optimize their page layout for better performance in search engine results (SEO). Learn how UserTesting helped them optimize page design to decrease bounce rates by 12%.

Learn more

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INCREASE CUSTOMER EMPATHYIn its list of “The 10 Habits of Customer-Centric Organizations in the Age of Digital Business,” Gartner shares top 4 practices:

1. Continuously listening to customers2. Consistently following up with customers on

their feedback3. Acting proactively to anticipate needs4. Building customer empathy into processes

and policies

Get a direct sight line into what customers want and expect by gathering their feedback and opinions at the cadence of your choosing.

CUSTOMER CHECK-INS / EXECUTIVE LISTENING TOURS

Customer check-ins are like health checkups: intermittent opportunities to learn what may be going wrong and to provide guidance to ensure future success. They also show your customers that you care about them and what they have to say.

Rather than being reactive on clients’ needs, when damage to the relationship may have already occurred, use UserTesting to regularly and proactively understand your customers’ current state, to identify pain points and ways you can continue to build on the relationship.

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TRUE VOICE OF CUSTOMER

It’s hard to align surveys and questionnaires, providing flat data and aggregated charts, as being the voice of your customers.

By presenting the voice and video of customers interacting with your mobile app, prototype, web and mobile website, UserTesting provides the most direct view of customer wants, needs and expectations—right from their mouths and in their own words.

It’s hard to overstate the value to a UX team of truly understanding customers, and helping them develop real empathy for what that user is going through, either on the site itself or the process.”

— Bradley Miller, Senior User Experience Researcher

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REAL WORLD TESTING / CAPTURE THE REAL EXPERIENCE IN NATIVE SETTINGS

Ever wish you could be a fly on the wall and watch your customers as they went about activities and decisions? And even better: if you could read their minds to better understand why they do the things they do?

Using the back facing camera on their phones, consumers record their experience at home, in store (shop alongs), competitor stores or really anywhere, giving you the most direct view of how they live and make decisions. Gain the most authentic lifestyles insights, “watching” customers freely move about in their native settings.

The world’s largest online learning and teaching marketplace conducted a diary study in order to observe mobile learners in their native environments. Learn what Udemy discovered about how, when and why people use mobile devices when completing online courses.

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EMOTIONAL RESPONSE FROM YOUR CUSTOMER

Brands are interested in the emotional connection with consumers, but traditional focus groups and interviews take weeks to set up and are very expensive.

With videos that provide customer feedback—in their own words— or the ability to conduct live interviews to hear customer responses and see what their body language conveys, you get the most direct insight into the emotional response and sentiment from customers.

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UserTesting enables every organization to deliver the best customer experience powered by human insight. With UserTesting’s on-demand Human Insight Platform, companies across industries make accurate customer-first decisions at every level, at the speed business demands. With UserTesting, product teams, marketers, digital and customerexperience executives confidently and quickly create the right experiences for all target audiences, increasing brand loyalty and revenue. UserTesting has over 1,200 subscription customers including half of the world’s top 100 brands, and has delivered human insights to over 35,000 companies to-date. Backed by Accel and OpenView, UserTesting isheadquartered in San Francisco, CA. To learn more, visit www.usertesting.com.

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