Im a user researcher at Conde Nast. It is our principle tool to connect with audiences across our brands. Primarily it is used for usability studies, interviews or mixed method testing. Both moderated and unmoderated. It does have a secondary use for surveys although this is less reliable given the wide scope of the pool of participants.
Pros
Its incredibly easy to use and customise screeners or tasks for usability testing
Quality of participants- its clear some fake their IP addresses and are not in the country you have screened for
The AI analytics are not the most functional from what I have seen, stick to what you're good at?
I find the scheduling for live sessions clunky to use, the calendar interface is very glitchy
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited to its original purpose- usability testing and interviews. This can be performed at pace, given the large audience (although our brands are very well known so this should not be a barrier) and there is a decent level of task customisation when conducting unmoderated testing. Its less appropriate for survey where you are looking to capture genuine intent/behaviour, even with screeners the data skews more positively than onsite survey, makes me question the quality of survey respondents.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Research & Development (1001-5000 employees)
I'm a UX Researcher at a B2B SaaS company and we had a lot of trouble reaching end users. We used UserTesting to recruit end users (non-administrators) of our product and complete moderated and unmoderated user research with them.
We also used UserTesting to speed up usability testing, relying on their unmoderated test set up and the analytics that are provided in the product to develop insights more quickly.
We used the Highlight Reel feature to make video clips easily of the customers' experience and shared them with team members to build empathy.
Pros
Highlight Reels
Speed of recruitment
Coverage if a participant is fraudulent or low quality
Community resources and guidance
Cons
Allowing the researcher to select which participants to use from a qualified pool
Greater flexibility with test-plan-building and types of questions
No B2B-specific panel
Ease of set up for non-UT-panel participants
Likelihood to Recommend
After using the tool for two years, I would recommend UserTesting if much of what you're testing is around marketing or communications. It's excellent for testing websites. But I think it is not as robust for testing more robust products. I also would recommend it more for B2C experiences, rather than B2B, as, in my opinion, they make it harder to recruit and select the perfect B2B participant.
We use UserTesting to try out new UX features that we want to implement. We also use it to understand customer problems onsite and how they interact with the website. This gives us a way to uses issues and address them.
Pros
Visualisation of what customers are doing
Ability to give directions to users
Video feedback
Cons
Better options to track clicks
Options to select power users /skills
Improved UX
Likelihood to Recommend
UserTesting is great when you are launching new features and want to understand how users are interacting with it. Most of the time you find they use it with a different way than planned in the UX development phase. It does require prompts for users, but if phased right it can provide great data.
Whenever we need number of resources to test our application using specific device we use UserTesting. This helped us to improve the UI of our application before it goes in actual market.We do get advice from UX team of UserTesting. Their advise really helped to improve our business through customer satisfaction.
Pros
UX Research
First level testing of your website
Digital optimization and analytics
Cons
UX research section needs improvement in terms of industry reports
Website conversions
Ad testing
Likelihood to Recommend
UserTesting is suitable when to have a team who will take care of your digital business in terms of UX design, marketing , device testing and in depth reports based on customer inputs. It is less suitable when you have internal sites which are not customer facing and improving the same will not increase your business revenue.
We use it to perform unmoderated user testing from time to time and organize individual interviews with customers. UserTesting provide us with access to an open-market customer base outside of our existing customers.
Pros
Summarising unmoderated user testing.
Ease of reviewing individual test clips.
Easy to set up unmoderated testing.
Cons
Avoid professional testers.
More natural, candid test participants.
Was hard to find the data summarising feature.
Likelihood to Recommend
It was good but would have been more effective with more natural participants, i.e., first-time test participants and fewer professional testers.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Research & Development (5001-10,000 employees)
At our German mobile games company, we use UserTesting extensively to improve the user experience and interface design. This tool allows us to reach specific target audiences, allowing them to offer real-time feedback on our mobile game prototypes via recorded audio and screen activity. Our use case for user testing includes everything from pre-launch idea testing to post-launch game enhancement. We investigate responses to game pitches or early prototypes during the concept phase. We test increasingly polished iterations of the games as production moves forward, concentrating on certain features like character design, stage difficulty, and UI options. We use UserTesting even after the game launches to improve it according to how players engage with various aspects/features of the game—which is frequently surprising.
Pros
Fast feedback from tester
Decent filters to set the audience profile for the tests
Mostly testers are great participants with good feedbacks
Great customer support
Cons
Add filters to Contributers Network feature!!!!
Add more features for data analysis (e.g. cross data from different participants)
Likelihood to Recommend
Mainly to test products from industries that are well-established and have a huge use base of users (e.g., beauty, health, bank applications, etc). I would not recommend it for things that are too niche (e.g. French card mobile games) because the tool doesn't have enough filters or screening questions to allow researchers to recruit participants from UserTesting userbase. Probably this is on purpose right?
UserTesting is helpful for us to get feedback on changes we would like to make in our user interfaces. The participants in studies help us learn which UX/UI is preferred and which UX/UI leads to more efficient and successful task completion. It's a very helpful tool to get rapid feedback. That allows us to iterate and test again, quickly, which is essential for our product teams.
Pros
Recruit good participants
Relatively intuitive screener and protocol creation
Easy to download data
Cons
I often need to spend time "cleaning" the data once I download it. I think the existing formatting could be improved
It's difficult to make a video clip
It would be great if there was a way to incorporate more advanced survey tools
Likelihood to Recommend
UserTesting is well suited for business end user and consumer end user research. I've found it less helpful for recruiting some more niche participant groups such as IT administrators.
I often utilize UserTesting's unmoderated sessions to get quick feedback on designs or prototypes. Sometimes I use it for moderated sessions as well.
Our team has been leveraging usertesting.com for conducting all the unmoderated and moderated research. The tool is pretty intuitive and helps our designer able to conduct the unmoderated tests without any support. The team at usertesting.com has been immensely helpful in working with us in putting together the right set of documentation which standardizes our overall research operations. Their acquisition of UserZoom has also integrated all our userbase into one. I highly recommend usertesting.com to others! We did evaluate other tools but the quality of the product, easy integration w/Figma and their Support system makes this an absolute 10/10!
Pros
Support system
Intuitive and easy to learn
Their certification process giving our users industry wide recognition
Cons
Not really with usertesting but there are opportunities with their integrations w/Figma
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for researchers to conduct moderated tests and UX designers to conduct unmoderated tests! Not suited for diary studies!
VU
Verified User
Director in Product Management (10,001+ employees)
We use UserTesting to validate product ideas, test our product's usability and iterate on product designs. UserTesting helps us see the usability issues of our product that are otherwise hard to see. We may be biased against our own product, or because we are too familiar it prevents us from seeing these issues. UserTesting also helps us minimize the time spent on usability tests as it enables us to do unmoderated tests with the demographic of our choice.
Pros
Taking notes with video clips. I can take notes while I am watching a session and I can create clips of UX issues or bugs occurring. This really helps when I share them with other teams.
Exporting all your notes. I analyze all usability tests by exporting my notes from UserTesting. I wish I could bulk export multiple tests though.
Setting up demographics. This helps me reach out to users who are similar to our audience.
Setting up screeners. Some studies require specific audiences (using a specific tool etc.), by setting screeners I can make sure I reached the correct audience.
Cons
Bulk exporting multiple tests.
I believe some contributors are lying on their demographic info. Sometimes when I try to reach native English speakers or another language, I come across users who are not native speakers even though I set up demographics accordingly.
Likelihood to Recommend
UserTesting is ideal for big companies that work in an agile setting. If you are working in a fast paces environment and need to get some insights fast, UserTesting helps a lot. If you are creative, and know how to ask questions, you would be surprised how fast UserTesting starts to show its value. We are a small team and we try to minimize our work load as much as we can by optimizing our research operations, so making unmoderated tests are very important to us. If you are a small company with limited resources though, it might be expensive. Then, buying multiple tools that cover different areas might actually become more affordable.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Research & Development (501-1000 employees)
I use the tool to understand “why” our numbers for traffic, click rates, customer satisfaction, etc are the way they are and insight into what to do to make improvements. Use cases can range from explaining interactions with a CTA (call to action) button to strategy for how we address a whole market. Biases from leadership are changed when we are able to share real customers sharing how they interact and why in videos. Before the tool, assumptions on what would work were only rhetorical and bias. Now we can provide real, transparent, truthful recommendations which have made dramatic impacts to all areas using the tool for research.
Pros
Observing how people react to experiences
Hearing the emphasis in feelings from interactions
Getting quotes from customers to make the case for changes
Using the survey to pull out thought, desires, and ideas from customers
Cons
Pulling the data together for presentations is rough and time consuming. I suggest that user testing perform testing on how we use the tool to organize the research to present to leaders so that additional tool to support this can be made available in the tool.
Custom network is clunky and difficult to use. It is not easy to get our customers and target market to sign up. I have to hand-hold them. Sometimes they don’t get the email to sign up. I would like to enter what I already know about them (profiles) into the tool myself and then send the invite for the test.
Would like to be able to search all past research on topics through the transcript rather than rely on just my notes.
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for observing, hearing, and asking. Bad for getting solid opinions unless you had a lot of people for stats. You cannot act on 5 people casually saying, “I like this over that,” because many times the testers just want to finish the test and give false positives.
