Calm + UserTesting

Calm’s small but mighty research team leveraged UserTesting’s platform to recruit participants from diverse backgrounds and automatically compensate them for providing their feedback. By receiving responses from 10x the participants in a fraction of the time, Calm transitioned from simple usability testing to more generative research.

​According to Chase, “The unlock for us is quality at velocity. We can get 10 different people to respond to a question in one hour and the quality of the answers is always awesome. We're asking people questions about their mental health and they're very forthcoming and honest. We get quality feedback that we can use. So much so that we've shifted from using UserTesting to test features—do people understand how to get from screen to screen?—to more generative research. Now we start off with a question like, ‘What's your relationship with stress and anxiety?’ and people just open up.” 

That leap from evaluating usability to conducting generative research explains how Calm created the new progress tracker within their app. “UserTesting helped us access the human insight we needed to understand how people correlate physical and mental wellness. For example, most of our users go to the gym three times a week. We realized that tracking progress would put ‘practicing mental health’ within reach.” 

Calm’s Research team set a goal to get users to accomplish three things in a week. They conducted straightforward prototype testing on the UserTesting platform. In addition to testing the visual options for optimal user experience, Calm’s researchers discovered the following:

• Where to place the progress tracker on the home page
• Customer expectations for the progress tracker 
• Clearer understanding of user ability levels
• Understanding that users prefer to complete three goals per week

The end result is a progress tracker on the home page that users love. 

UserTesting value extends beyond research efficiency and effectiveness, to helping Calm’s engineering teams. By testing concepts and prototypes directly on the platform, Calm quickly identifies the most promising ideas. Receiving feedback this early in the product development lifecycle allows the company to avoid investing months of effort into features and concepts that won’t resonate with their users. The ability to quickly iterate and receive feedback from a diverse group of participants helps Calm prioritize data driven decisions over emotional ones. 

Overall, Calm has leveraged UserTesting to better understand their users and fulfill their mission of helping people achieve better mental wellness. “It really has been a key player in helping us understand the murky but massive field of mental wellness. It's a difficult area for research, especially with a small team. We wouldn't be able to do half the stuff we've done without this platform.”