UserTesting: Answering “Why?” at Scale

January 28, 2015

usertesting logo large

We are excited to welcome UserTesting, the world’s leading user experience platform, to the OpenView family after participating in their $45.5m Series C. UserTesting is the kind of company you dream of working with as an investor — a brilliant team who encountered a problem first-hand that many considered unsolvable, and who built a platform empowering organizations to solve it. The problem was one that all software developers, product managers, and marketers face: understanding why users behave the way they do, not simply tracking what they are doing.

The key to UserTesting’s innovation isn’t just that they’ve created a solution to that problem, they’ve found a way to solve it at scale.

Businesses have always wanted to do more qualitative research with customers, but the traditional methods of collecting this information have historically been too slow and expensive to use consistently. As a result, enterprises lose billions of dollars every year because of bad user experiences. UserTesting’s platform makes qualitative research fast, easy, and inexpensive by crowdsourcing participants, providing a platform for recording feedback, and managing the results.

By productizing what has traditionally been an expensive and time-intensive manual process, UserTesting gives anyone designing a customer experience — from an app developer at her kitchen table to a Fortune 500 marketing executive — access to feedback from real users in real time.

Real Feedback from Real Users

UserTesting is the only company to have productized usability testing with true amateur testers, the closest alternatives being in-person sessions run in-house or through an agency. By allowing organizations to recruit target demographics from UserTesting’s panel of more than a million participants — or simply by using their own customers and website visitors — marketers, product managers, and UX designers have on-demand access to people in their target audience who deliver audio, video, and written feedback on their experience. The results come in hours, not days.

By removing the friction associated with user-experience research, UserTesting allows customers to consistently and iteratively incorporate qualitative insights to understand why their users are taking specific actions the same way they currently use analytics to tell them what actions those users are taking. This transforms the way an organization designs experiences for its end user, whether on a website, mobile app, or even with a physical product.

Insight into Any User, Anywhere: Bridging the Physical to Digital Divide

One of the most powerful aspects of UserTesting’s platform is that is extends well-beyond website and application testing to cover virtually any user experience, anywhere. The company’s smartphone and tablet recording technology enables its customers to not only test user experiences on mobile applications, but also “in-the-wild” at brick-and-mortar stores, live events, and in other real-world locations. This makes it easy for an enterprise to test an omnichannel customer journey that includes the web, mobile devices, and in-store experiences. Extending the principle of frequent, iterative user-experience testing to the physical world is a revolutionary idea, and UserTesting has established itself as a leading provider of user research to the world’s largest and most sophisticated organizations by turning these ideas into reality.

With more than 30,000 customers including 10 out of the top 10 web properties, UserTesting is well on its way to empowering every organization to get the feedback it needs to create excellent customer experiences. At OpenView, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with the UserTesting team in making this vision a reality.

 

Partner<br>OpenView

Mackey is a Partner at OpenView focusing on enterprise infrastructure and data driven application software.