Identify pitfalls and opportunities for improvement of your website with UserTest

Originally published at siftery.com.

Remote user testing is observing a user interacting with your platform or site, and not being in the same room as them. The benefit of conducting remote user testing is the participant is in their natural environment e.g. at home, in their office etc.

Remote user testing offers a fresh pair of eyes. What you think your users will do and what they actually do, are notoriously different. Remote user testing allows you to recruit participants and at cost effective prices. Furthermore, remote user testing allows you to add more context to your tests e.g. using a grocery list app at a shop.

UserTest.io is an affordable remote user testing platform. No need to pay an agency for a large laboratory — setup a test and UserTest’s participants will complete it in their natural location. It helps you receive high quality videos of your users using your website to identify pitfalls and opportunities for improvement. With feedback from testers, you’ll soon have a wealth of ideas for optimising your website. Remote user testing provides actionable feedback fast.

Kevin William David interviewed Preston Daniel, Growth hacking & Optimization Specialist at UserTest.io to learn more.

Can you tell us about what you are working on? What is UserTest.io?

UserTest.io is an affordable, rapid user testing platform. We provide high-quality recordings of your users completing set activities/tasks while they voice their thoughts and opinions. You receive top notch insight to what your users think of your product/website/prototype and how they interact with it. From these insights, you’ll be able to improve your user experiences by identifying particular user patterns in the recordings you receive.
Our price point allows businesses to test more, improve more and increase conversions sooner, rather than later.

Why are you building this? What problem are you trying to solve?

UserTest.io was built in house for a conversion rate optimisation agency called User Conversion. It’s popularity with UserConversion’s clients have meant the public release of the platform. The main inspiration behind the product now is there are too many user testing platforms that are expensive and don’t provide feedback quicker enough for startups, SME’s etc to act and make necessary change to improve their user experiences. We want to provide high-quality, quick user feedback for businesses to improve their user experiences and not break their bank!

Who are your top competitors & how is UserTest.io different from what’s already exists in the market? What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use UserTest.io?

UserTest.io’s top competitors would have to be UserTesting.com and WhatUsersDo. UserTesting.com because they’re such a large user testing business and WhatUsersDo as they are UK based, as are we.
In terms of how we are different, our price point sets us apart from other user testing platforms. Why pay £500 for 10 testers upfront, when you can pay £108 (inc VAT) for 10 testers and pay for them, when you want to. All profit that UserTest receives, is fed straight into the development of the product.

What’s unique about UserTest.io is the ROI you receive for such a low price point. We can return user recordings to you within 24hrs of creating a test. Businesses don’t have time to wait around. Time = money. Our price point also allows business to test rapidly and more often and therefore, improving the user experience at an accelerated rate.

Who uses UserTest? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using UserTest? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies ?

Our early customers were startups. We released an open BETA and offered free user testing to our first customers, in which startups took advantage of.

We have a varied array of users at UserTest.io. From Design Directors, CEOs, Head of Conversion Rate Optimisation to User Experience Designers and UX Leads.

How are your customers using UserTest? Could you share a few different use cases?

User test is being used in varying ways; from large user testing projects to mini-projects that are repeated. The beauty with the price point is that user testing should be a cheap outlay, meaning the ‘smaller’ journeys can be reviewed and tested against. It’s affordability means you can do more with less, if that makes sense. Some of our users are therefore testing prototypes, AB experiments, larger projects, micro-journies because the price point allows them to test more often without the cost implications.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Of course! Twitter is an untapped market — the only problem with Twitter is, there’s so much content constantly being served, that staying top of mine or being noticed is extremely difficulty.

Using a IFTTT or Zapier, you’re able to pull Twitter followers from specific profiles to a Google Sheets for example. So, create an account with IFTTT or Zapier. Specify a specific Twitter account — usually an account that is similar to the product or service you have. For every new follower they get, have IFTTT or Zapier send that user data to a Gsheet. If those people are following that similar Twitter account, they’re most likely interested in your product.

Create a custom Twitter audience for the Twitter profiles you pull through. Run the campaign for a week and then hit that follow button. You’ll be top of (subconsciously) and when you hit the follow button, you’re there, in their face.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Some of the biggest challenges were the technical platform in which to use. We actually changed platform 3 times mid-project, post-scope to account for the rapid changes in the market! When creating a tech startup it’s about developing that MVP to iterate on and evolve with. We were in the fortunate position that our clients were already using the product on a daily basis and therefore feedback was easy and readily available.

What are top 5–10 products that you depend to run the company & how do you use them?

• HotJar: Used for screen recordings and heatmaps. HotJar has allowed us to identify user behaviours and make design amends to improve user experience and increase conversions.
• Intercom: Intercom serves as our CRM and onboarding tool. Intercom has allowed us to gain leads for both sides of our product i.e. testers and customers
• FullStory: FullStory has provided so much insight to how potential users are interacting with our website. The use of segmenting user behaviour is brilliant! The integration with Intercom as well, allows us to see the ‘why’ a user is asking a particular question, has a particular problem etc.
• Google Analytics: UserTest.io is owned by a conversion rate optimisation agency called User Conversion — we live live with data. Google Analytics allows us to segment data, identify patterns and improve conversions by using the data to build A/B tests.
• Optimizely: Optimizely serves as our A/B testing tool, in which Optimizey, FullStory, and Google Analytics constantly work in conjunction with one another.
• Google Tag Manager: We use GTM to track our users intentions e.g. clicks, changes to form fields etc. We also use GTM to deploy website changes to free up our developer’s time.

Do you use UserTest and recommend them? You can do it here https://siftery.com/usertest?recommend.