Frequently Asked Questions

UserTesting is a platform for getting rapid customer feedback on almost any customer experience you can imagine, including websites, mobile apps, prototypes, and real world experiences. You’ll receive audio and video recordings of real people from your target market speaking their thoughts as they complete tasks you specify.

With continuous user feedback, you can:

• Identify pain points in your customer experience
• Understand what your customers are thinking and feeling
• Validate design decisions before committing resources
• Influence stakeholders to make improvements

Anyone who cares about customer experience, including eCommerce managers, UX research teams, product managers, marketers, and designers. We’re used extensively by the world’s most demanding consumer websites and apps, more than half of the top 100 brands in the world.

We’ve invested heavily in online tools that let you set up a test on your own in minutes, and we also have a full-service research team for complex studies. Here are some research goals that are possible with UserTesting.

Understand your complete user experience with these research methodologies:

• Moderated and unmoderated studies
• Longitudinal testing
• Focus groups
• Survey questions and numeric rating scales
• Competitive benchmarking
• Net promoter scores
• A/B testing
• Time on task analysis
• Click maps, navigation tree testing and card sorting

Recruit your exact target audience with our sampling services:

• Test with your own customers
• With our Pro plans, you can invite your own customers to participate in your user tests.
• Custom recruitment, managed directly by us (you won’t be shoved off to a third party)
• International testing
• Sample sizes as small or as large as you want them to be

Launch a new product confidently through continuous software development research

• Prototype and wireframe tests
• App store pages and app icon tests
• Unreleased apps / beta builds
• Competitor tests

Improve your customer experience through these advanced insights

• Shop-alongs
• Product unboxing and setup
• Light ethnographics
• Online ordering, in-store pickup
• Omnichannel customer experience (if you can imagine it, we can probably test it)
• Uncover the whys behind your CX metrics (NPS, Foresee, customer satisfaction, etc).

For simple self-serve tests, you‘ll start receiving results in as little as an hour. Response time can vary depending on the time of day when you order, and tests can take longer if you request users with very specific demographic requirements.

If you’re working with our professional services team to run your study, the typical turnaround time from your first meeting to the final report is two weeks, and more complex studies can take longer.

To uncover user experience issues in a product, we recommend five participants per study. It’s more effective to do a series of small tests at multiple points throughout development, rather than one large study at the end. That helps you identify problems early, when it’s easier to fix them. You can start testing an app or website as soon as you have concept sketches or wireframes.

If you’re looking for trends and insights beyond basic usability issues, we recommend five to eight participants per audience segment.

In addition to capturing video and audio, you can include quantitative analysis and survey questions including multiple choice, rating scales, and written responses.

The test participants on the UserTesting panel are real people in their natural environments, not usability experts. They are normal people who have been screened to make sure they articulate what they are thinking as they complete tests on the UserTesting platform. Learn more about the panel.

Yes, we have a network of test participants from all over the world.

We have a few features that allow you to test with anyone. You can either bring your own panel of customers into the platform—for on-going feedback—or simply send a link to anyone in your contact list.

Sign up here. If you are accepted, you’ll earn up to $60 for each test or interview you successfully complete.

You can test your app at any stage of development (from prototype to beta to published) and on iOS or Android. No SDK integration is required. Learn more about mobile app testing. You can also conduct studies on your App Store or Play Store listing and app icons.

Yes. Save time and engineering resources by running user tests on prototypes, staging websites or unpublished apps. When writing your test instructions, just let users know to expect a site or app that is only partially working. If it requires a username/password, you can give test participants login credentials in your test instructions.

Yes, you can run customer experience tests that range from shop-alongs and product unboxing to multi-channel customer experiences that include interactions both online and in the physical world. If you can record it with a smartphone camera, we can probably test it for you.

With our customizable Pro plans, our professional services team can create the tests for you and report on the findings. Our research team consists of world class user experience experts. Services include:

• Turn business questions into research objectives
• Determine best research methodology for your objectives
• Create or review test plans
• Optimize studies for unmoderated testing
• Recruit and vet participants
• Create clickable prototypes from existing designs
• Watch and annotate videos
• Create clips and highlight reels
• Summarize and prioritize findings
• Prepare reports and debriefs

Yes, you can test any website. You can also run a comparison test in which the user interacts with two different websites–such as your website and a competitor’s–and tells you which they prefer and why.

If your study requires test participants to go through a complete checkout process, provide participants with fictitious credit card information or gift codes in order to complete the checkout process without entering their own credit card information.

Yes. Our screen recording software records both the audio of the speaker and video of the screen. For mobile recordings, you can see taps, swipes, and gestures, and you can have the user turn on the backside camera to record real-world experiences.

Videos are usually between 10 and 15 minutes. The length depends on how many tasks the user is asked to do. With our Pro plans, you can record videos as long as an hour.