Customer environment and context

Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall as customers interact with your product? While some moderated and unmoderated tests limit results down to a screen, customer environment and context testing, also known as ethnography studies, opens up opportunities for you to virtually be in customers’ shoes. Easily see, hear, and talk to your customers remotely as they engage with your products, apps, and messaging while recording from their phone’s rear-facing camera.

For instance, you can ask participants to show you their surroundings, such as a living room or inside their vehicle, or show how they typically interact with a product like a thermostat or a toaster. Verbal insight you may obtain could include how children or elderly adults impact the way technology is used. Unspoken insight is just as valuable and could showcase how customers store an item in their home or which environmental factors they value. With UserTesting’s mobile recorder, you can even opt to conduct customer experience studies, such as unboxing and destination studies.

This template allows you to uncover relationships between a user’s experience and the real world. You may choose to launch this form of study after a new product launch to study initial reactions, or to guide new product development.

If your organization follows the Design Thinking Process, where an organization looks to understand customers and redefine problems, we recommend evaluating customer environment and context in the early stages—long before design, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

This customer environment and context template offers pre-made questions that you can reuse, build off of, or be inspired by.

1. Have a target environment in mind

Depending on your product, you may choose for your test participants to be filming from their home or at a brick-and-mortar store.

2. Research recording rules and regulations in advance

If you’re hoping for your participant to record themselves in a store, remember that filming isn’t allowed in all places.

3. Factor in personal identifiable information (PII)

While this should be kept in mind with all tests, as participants share their laptop or mobile screens, it’s all the more relevant when they film their personal environment. Screener questions offer a chance to be transparent, from acknowledging the comfort level of a participant to understanding that not all test participants will opt in.