From 10 tests a year to testing everything—in 24 hours

Mark's mandate was clear from the start: break down the barriers between the business and its users. That meant finding a way to make customer insight fast, frequent, and impossible to deprioritise.

After evaluating 7 competitors, every member of the team independently reached the same conclusion—no one came close to UserTesting on both features and panel quality. UserTesting became the foundation of a new testing culture. Credits were planned carefully and used almost exclusively for prototype testing, with each study taking less than 24 hours from launch to results—compared to the two weeks (minimum) that moderated testing had required.

"The argument that 'we don't have time to test' has been completely eliminated. We now do it in 24 hours." — Mark Spooner, UX Manager, Motability Operations

The impact was immediate and measurable. Product teams stopped needing persuasion—they began proactively requesting tests. That cultural reversal—from testing as optional nice-to-have to testing as a baseline expectation—is perhaps the most significant shift the partnership with UserTesting enabled.

One project stands out as a turning point—not just for the UX team, but for the entire business.

Motability ran an information architecture study to evaluate how easily customers could navigate their digital experience. The initial results were striking: task success rates sat at roughly 10%, with very high time-on-task scores and a stream of frustrated comments from participants. The data told a stark story—users were lost, confused, and struggling.

The team used those insights to redesign the navigation structure, then retested. The transformation was dramatic: time-on-task dropped by 60–70%. But the greater impact came when Mark took the findings—including raw session clips—to the wider business.

"Everybody was blown away. It really helped the wider business understand what it means to design for users, rather than designing as a business." — Mark Spooner, UX Manager, Motability Operations

This is where Mark sees UserTesting's deepest value: hearing a frustrated customer is what actually lands with the wider business. No data visualisation, no internal presentation, no product manager's gut feeling carries the same weight as the authentic voice of a confused or delighted user.

As the team grew more confident, so did the scope of what they tested. Motability started using tools like Figma Make and Lovable to create experiences that feel genuinely real, particularly on mobile. These higher-fidelity stimuli generate more authentic behavioural insights, because participants interact with them the way they would with a live product.

UserTesting also became a tool for what Mark calls "pre-discovery"—testing existing journeys before a project even begins, to build the case for investment. Without the voice of the customer to demonstrate a problem exists, he argues, work simply doesn't make it onto the roadmap. With it, even long-neglected experiences can find their moment.

The dealer-facing system—used by car dealers to process customer orders—is a live example. Years of inaction were reversed once rich user insight provided the evidence needed to make the case for attention. Motability, a business with a 90%+ customer satisfaction rating sustained over decades, now has the tools to look backwards as well as forwards.

The move to an unlimited Ultimate package opened the door to testing the live website at scale, deeper qualitative questioning, proposition and concept testing for the marketing team, and potentially challenging business-centric thinking with real users before UX work even begins.

"My job is to influence the business to be user-centred. That's what this tool does—it gives the customer's voice the weight it deserves." — Mark Spooner, UX Manager, Motability Operations

For Mark and his team, the destination is clear: a business where no decision of consequence goes untested, where every team—product, design, marketing, and exec—can access and act on real human insight, and where the excuse of "we don't have time" has been permanently retired.