EnjoyHQ

What is UserTesting

UserTesting is a software platform known as the Human Insight Platform. Its main purpose is to help companies get feedback from real users on their products, websites, mobile apps, and prototypes. Businesses can see and hear people interact with their creations, which provides valuable insights to improve user experience. The platform allows for the creation of tests with specific tasks and questions, which are then completed by participants from a global network. UserTesting was founded in 2007 and has its headquarters in San Francisco, California. It helps teams in product, design, marketing, and user experience research to make decisions based on customer feedback rather than assumptions.

UserTesting Features

UserTesting offers a range of features to gather and analyze user feedback effectively.

• Target Audience Selection: You can choose participants from the UserTesting Contributor Network based on specific demographics like age, gender, income, and location. You can also use your own customers or employees for feedback.
• Comprehensive Testing Capabilities: The platform supports various types of tests, including website usability testing, mobile app testing, prototype testing, and real-world experience evaluation.
• Video Feedback: The core feature is receiving video recordings of users speaking their thoughts aloud as they complete tasks. This provides qualitative insights into their experience.
• AI-Powered Analytics: UserTesting uses artificial intelligence to analyze feedback quickly. It can automatically transcribe videos, create sentiment analysis, and identify key themes and patterns from user sessions, saving researchers time.
• Highlight Reels and Clips: You can easily create short video clips of important moments from user tests. These clips can be combined into a highlight reel to share with stakeholders and team members to demonstrate user issues or positive feedback.
• Templates: The platform includes a library of pre-built test templates for common use cases, such as testing a new feature, comparing two websites, or evaluating a marketing campaign. This helps teams launch tests faster.
• Integrations: UserTesting connects with popular tools used by product and design teams, allowing for a smoother workflow.

UserTesting Pricing Plans

UserTesting provides customized pricing plans tailored to the needs of different organizations. The plans are generally structured in three tiers.

• Essentials Plan: This plan is designed for individuals or small teams who are new to user feedback. It provides core features for creating and launching basic tests to a limited audience.
• Advanced Plan: Aimed at growing teams and companies, this plan offers more advanced features. It includes more testing capabilities, broader audience targeting options, and enhanced analytics and reporting tools.
• Ultimate Plan: This is the enterprise-level solution for large organizations. It includes all features, advanced security, dedicated support, and the ability to scale user research across the entire company. It also provides access to the API and more integrations.

Pricing is not publicly listed; potential customers need to contact the sales team for a custom quote based on their specific requirements.

UserTesting Free Plan

UserTesting does not offer a permanent free plan. However, the company provides a free trial for businesses interested in evaluating the platform. To access the trial, you typically need to request a demo with their sales team. The trial allows you to explore the platform's features, create a test, and receive feedback from a limited number of participants. This helps you understand how the platform works and whether it fits your needs before committing to a paid plan.

How to use UserTesting

Getting started with UserTesting is a straightforward process.

1. Define Your Goal: First, decide what you want to learn. For example, you might want to know if users can successfully complete a purchase on your website.
2. Create a Test Plan: Log in to the platform and start a new test. You can use a pre-built template or create a custom test plan from scratch.
3. Select Your Audience: Choose the demographics of the participants you want for your test. You can filter by age, location, income, and other criteria.
4. Write Tasks and Questions: Create a series of tasks for the user to perform (e.g., "Find a blue t-shirt and add it to your cart"). Add follow-up questions to gather more specific feedback.
5. Launch the Test: Once your test plan is ready, you can launch it. UserTesting will then find participants who match your criteria.
6. Analyze Results: You will start receiving video feedback, often within a few hours. Watch the videos, review the AI-powered insights, and identify key findings.
7. Share Insights: Create highlight reels of the most important moments and share them with your team to drive action and improvements.

Pros and Cons of UserTesting

Pros:

• Fast Feedback: You can get results from user tests in a matter of hours, which speeds up the product development cycle.
• Large Participant Pool: Access to a large and diverse global network of participants makes it easy to find your target audience.
• Rich Qualitative Data: Video recordings of users thinking aloud provide deep insights that are not possible with quantitative data alone.
• Easy to Share: The platform makes it simple to create and share video clips and reports with stakeholders who could not watch the full sessions.
• Powerful Analytics: AI-driven features help to quickly analyze hours of video feedback, saving significant time.

Cons:

• Cost: The platform can be expensive, especially for small businesses, startups, or individual consultants.
• Participant Quality: While generally good, the quality of feedback can sometimes be inconsistent depending on the participant.
• Requires Good Test Design: The value of the feedback heavily depends on how well the tasks and questions are written. Poorly designed tests will yield poor results.

UserTesting integrations

UserTesting integrates with a variety of popular tools to help teams incorporate user feedback into their daily workflows.

• Slack: Get notifications and share video clips directly in your Slack channels to keep the team updated on research findings.
• Jira: Create Jira issues directly from UserTesting insights, linking user feedback to development tasks.
• Trello: Send insights and video clips to Trello cards to manage feedback within your project boards.
• Adobe XD: Test Adobe XD prototypes directly with users to get feedback early in the design process.
• Asana: Create tasks in Asana based on user feedback to ensure insights are acted upon.
• Qualtrics: Combine qualitative insights from UserTesting with quantitative survey data from Qualtrics for a more complete picture of the user experience.

UserTesting Alternatives

• Maze: A rapid testing platform that focuses more on quantitative usability metrics from unmoderated tests. It is great for prototype and website testing and is often more affordable, making it popular with smaller teams.
• Lookback: This tool offers moderated and unmoderated testing capabilities. A key differentiator is its live testing feature, where you can talk to users in real-time as they navigate your app or website.
• UserZoom: (Now part of UserTesting) A comprehensive UX insights platform that offers a wide range of research methods, including usability testing, surveys, and card sorting. It is a powerful enterprise-level alternative.
• Hotjar: While not a direct competitor for usability testing, Hotjar provides tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and on-site surveys. It helps you understand what users do on your site, complementing the 'why' that UserTesting provides.
• Figma: For teams focused on design, Figma's built-in prototyping and commenting features offer a basic way to gather feedback directly within the design tool, though it lacks a dedicated tester panel.

UserTesting API

Yes, UserTesting provides a Developer API for its customers, typically available on the Ultimate plan. The API allows you to automate tasks and integrate UserTesting data with other systems. You can use it to programmatically create tests, access test results, and retrieve video clips.

To get an API key, you need to be on an eligible plan and generate the key from your account settings or by contacting your customer support manager. The developer documentation is available on the UserTesting website for guidance.

Here is a conceptual example of an API call to retrieve test data:

const fetch = require('node-fetch');

const API_TOKEN = 'your_api_bearer_token';
const TEST_ID = 'your_test_id';

const url = `https://api.usertesting.com/v1/tests/${TEST_ID}`;

const options = {
  method: 'GET',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': `Bearer ${API_TOKEN}`,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  }
};

fetch(url, options)
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(json => console.log(json))
  .catch(err => console.error('error:' + err));

UserTesting Affiliate program

UserTesting does not have a public affiliate program where you can earn commissions for referring new customers to their software platform. Their main focus is on direct sales and partnerships with larger organizations.

However, they do have a referral program for finding new test participants (contributors) for the UserTesting Contributor Network. If you are interested in a business partnership or collaboration, it is best to contact their partnership or marketing team directly through their official website to discuss potential opportunities.