Press Release

USERTESTING HELPS TO SCALE CUSTOMER RESEARCH AS HUMAN-CENTRIC DECISIONS CONTINUE TO DRIVE THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY

Latest Product Features Empower More Teams and Divisions to Embrace the Power of Human Insights for Deeper Customer Empathy and Continuous Customer Learning

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif – November 29, 2018 – UserTesting, the leading on-demand human insight platform, today announced new advancements to the platform designed to empower more teams – beyond the UX Researcher, to target their exact customers, empathize with their experiences, gain insights, collaborate, and share these insights to make better business decisions. With the latest release of Workspaces, Approval Workflow, Tagging, and User Roles, UserTesting has streamlined how cross-functional teams can conduct customer research, while ensuring a level of quality and governance is maintained.

In the Experience Economy, it has become an employee-wide responsibility to be truly customer obsessed – to engage, understand, and learn from customers – in an effort to drive better business outcomes across the organization. Companies that have built this continuous learning process into their ethos are able to better compete and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

Customers including CarMax, Microsoft and XO Group Inc. have all embraced UserTesting to scale their customer research needs and have been successful in empowering broader teams to drive their own customer research programs in an effort to build better, more human-centered products.

CarMax needed to empower their teams to get valuable user insights more frequently—and firsthand—so they could design solutions that moved the needle for the organization. “Having the product manager, the product designer, and the product engineer all involved in the user testing process was key,” said Archie Miller, Discovery Discipline Lead at CarMax. “Not only did the product team members set up the UserTesting studies themselves, they also watched and discussed the videos together, allowing them to find new ideas and solutions. This gives the team a sense of shared ownership and shared understanding of how customers use the product.”

“Conducting customer research and sharing insights across the organization are an integral part of our business — it’s how we ensure we are building human-centered products, services, and marketing campaigns,” said Marieke McCloskey, Head of Product Insights at UserTesting. “As our company has grown, so has our research requirements. In order for us to be able to meet the demand, we had to operationalize how research can be conducted and data accessed. We have taken an innovative approach to scaling research across the organization. Our centralized Product Insights team, comprised of UX Researchers and Data Scientists, conducts strategic foundational research themselves, while empowering non-researchers through training and tools to use customer insights to make better business decisions.”

According to Forrester’s Digital CX Trends, 2018 report, “The Microsoft Office division democratized user testing and usability studies by training 200 of its product managers and designers in how to conduct studies via UserTesting — allowing researchers to turn to more strategic projects.”

UserTesting makes scaling customer research across departments a simpler process with the latest release of:

  • Workspaces - Makes it easy for organizations to manage large numbers of studies across multiple workgroups and project teams and simplifies how companies handle security, privacy, and sharing settings to ensure compliance standards are met.

  • Approval Workflow - Enables a trained researcher or team to provide oversight on multiple groups or divisions looking to create and execute customer-focused studies. Companies can decentralize the ownership of customer research, while still maintaining a level of confidence in the quality of studies by having access controls to set templates, review questions, and launch tests.

  • Tagging - Provides support for industry standard digital protocols such as hashtags to give customers a powerful, but easy means to flag and categorize key insights and create highlight reels of clips, enabling both individuals and teams to build, connect, and apply learnings from across the organization in delivering superior customer experiences.

  • User Roles - Provides administrators with the ability to manage various roles across teams including power users, standard users, and collaborators – a powerful capability for large enterprises with distributed workforces or multiple workgroups and divisions with a need to control user access privileges.

With the availability of Workspaces, Approval Workflow, Tagging and User Roles, the UserTesting platform can more effectively support enterprises looking to break research bottlenecks and scale customer research, while helping to delight customers, reduce their risk of failure, increase their time to insights, and lower their total cost of delivery.

“Our company has embraced a Design Thinking mindset, which has allowed us to take a deep interest in developing an understanding of the customers for whom we’re designing our products,” said Chris Abad, VP of Product Management & Design at UserTesting. “We’re seeing a trend in companies adopting this approach as well – they are benefitting from being agile and iterating often, and developing a strong empathy with their target user. At UserTesting we’re building our platform with this in mind and helping more companies scale their customer research initiatives to be able to align to their new Design Thinking models.”

In a world increasingly built around collaboration, business leaders are under more pressure than ever to deliver results that positively impact customer experience and as a result must look to adopt best practices and technologies that increase customer learning, communication, and empathy.

To learn how to leverage UserTesting to scale customer research in your organization, visit this page here.

Media Contact

UserTesting, Inc.
Andy Dear
press@usertesting.com 

About UserTesting

UserTesting is fundamentally changing the way digital products and experiences are built and delivered by helping organizations get insights from customers–from concept to execution. Built on top of a world-class, on-demand sourcing