What UserZoom’s product journey means for modern UX research

UserZoom’s focus is to become a truly modern UX research platform for organizations, where you can automate user research and usability testing for both speed and scale. Therefore, UserZoom’s Fall release marks an incredible milestone in the UserZoom product history, releasing a UX Results beta that will evolve toward a next-gen, AI-powered UX Results Dashboard to translate unstructured data into actionable insights most efficiently.

In the last two years, every product area has seen an enhancement. In this short amount of time, we have realized significant advances in how our customers build UX studies, source participants, and analyze results to get the insights they need to design and deliver great digital experiences.

But how did we get there? What lessons have we learned? What does the future of UserZoom, and indeed, UX research look like?

Please indulge us as we lift the hood on the UserZoom product development machine, tinker around for a while, and answer all these questions. We’re a product company, first and foremost, and we’re proud of what we’ve achieved from a development standpoint, and we also want to be transparent and share the next steps of our journey with you.

But first, to help put UserZoom’s journey into context, let’s look at how the UX landscape has evolved over the last few years.

The evolution of UX

Having worked in the UX space for about 20 years, I’ve seen this industry progress. When I think about its evolution, there are a few things that come to mind:

1. Good design is appreciated by everyone across the board, including C-level execs

It used to be a ‘nice to have,’ focused mostly on visual design. But today, form and function are both absolute musts. UX designers work on both interaction and visual design, and product quality is judged by not just how it looks but how it functions. Thank you, iPhone!

2. Research is design. Design is research.

We’re witnessing the ‘democratization’ of insight. UX research and usability testing is no longer limited to well-trained, experienced researchers. Thanks to automation, designers, product managers, and digital marketers can appreciate the power of UX research and welcome it into their process. Many of the most competitive companies now realize you can’t have one without the other.

3. UX research is no longer an isolated activity

It used to be that companies would conduct one study per quarter, often even once or twice a year. Still, today we see how automation enables teams to run multiple studies every week, or at least every agile sprint, both in the lab and remotely. Thanks to software, research is getting embedded into the Agile Dev processes, surfacing user feedback in a fast and cost-effective way.

There’s no excuse not to test the design before you move into production. And there are also plenty of options to run user research before and after design begins, so you can better understand who you’re designing for. So research is present at every stage of the product life cycle.

So how has UserZoom adapted to this modern UX landscape?

The modern UserZoom

Over ten years ago we started building an online research tool for the advanced UX researcher to automate the tedious process of conducting usability studies. Over time we added more functionality and capabilities, making it a unique multi-method UX research solution. In October 2015, the modern UserZoom was born after raising $34 million in Series A venture capital – this enabled us to begin investing in the three key areas of our product that relate to three key components of UX research – study design and creation, participant sourcing, and results analysis.

Study design and creation

Throughout 2017, we simplified the product experience and made all types of studies easier to create. We added Basic Usability Testing to help non-researchers confidently launch their own UX tests. We then added our Remote Moderated service so that you can now conduct moderated and unmoderated studies on the same platform, making UserZoom your true one-stop-shop for all UX research needs.

In addition, everything is much easier and simpler to use across all study types, thanks to more in-product videos and more contextual help, a greater number of study templates, and an investment in our own personnel that enables the kind of white-glove support that only a genuine customer-centric company can deliver.

Participant sourcing

Our participant sourcing capabilities are now the most comprehensive in the marketplace. With the launch of Intellizoom, our intelligent sourcing engine, you can leverage your own users for free or have access to over 120 million users worldwide. Over 28 million of these are accessible instantly with the click of a button.

Since the acquisition of YouEye in 2016 and WhatUsersDo in 2018 and the integration of their tech stack and high-quality European panel, UserZoom can build towards creating the participant sourcing solution that all enterprises need. Further enhancements in 2018 included integrations with other panels, self-service screeners, and automated participant sourcing for all study types across many countries.

Remote video URL

Results analysis

Launching our Results Beta represents a major step in making it easier to uncover and share UX insights. UserZoom has already invested in enhancements such as the integration with Tableau, which enables you to connect UX data and metrics with other business data and seamlessly create visualizations. Now it’s even easier to analyze results in UserZoom with updated charts and graphs, simpler navigation, enhanced UI, and new filtering capabilities.

These enhancements further advance UserZoom’s unique position as the UX insights company, where quantitative and qualitative data is now easier to understand.

Moving into 2019, UserZoom is developing results further by enhancing the Beta and launching new qualitative analysis features. In conjunction with this, we’ll be looking again at how studies are created in UserZoom to make the journey from UX questions to studies to results even faster and simpler.

UserZoom and the future of user research

UX has become a competitive advantage and a critical aspect of any digital transformation. In the coming years, we will see the need to consume UX insights in a much more efficient, automated, and integrated way.

Brands have more data than they can handle and can’t rely on human intervention or just one or two sources of data and user feedback. An NPS only tells you part of a story. Tracking consumer behavior at an aggregate level with commonly deployed analytics tools won’t be enough. Replaying sessions of users using your product won’t produce statistically significant results that yield confident conclusions. To deliver great UX design, brands will need insights into the What, Why, and How users do what they do.

They’ll need to gain strategic insights into users’ needs and goals before building products. They’ll need to run way more research than their competitors to continuously test and measure the quality of the digital experience. This is why we are seeing the increased value in UX testing and research and the evolution of an integrated UX, CX, and Voice of the Customer ecosystem.

At UserZoom, we’re building the most sophisticated and robust UX Insights platform on the planet. We’re adapting to the current needs and demands of our sophisticated customers to deliver high-quality insights in a fast and cost-effective way for a multi-device, global digital marketplace.

Further, as UX maturity evolves in the industry, more roles in the organization take part. This is why UserZoom will continue to evolve our role-based access to help expose the most relevant capabilities based on a user’s contribution.

A UX researcher will always need the full breadth of UX research capabilities while collaborating with broader teams of UX designers and product managers, who may only need a limited set of capabilities to perform quick, agile testing while contributing to the broader UX strategy.     

Regardless of the many features and capabilities available, we’re working on making building a study easy and intuitive, even for those who are not research experts. We’re expanding our sourcing solutions, covering more geographic areas than ever, and increasing the speed at which our customers can collect feedback without sacrificing the quality of the responses.

Finally, we’re also working on a next-gen, AI-powered analytics engine to help turn unstructured data into actionable insights most efficiently.

The end result is the most powerful solution for continuous and effective user research. UserZoom is a true strategic partner to scale UX research and make it a strong differentiator in the highly competitive digital marketplace.