Glossary

A call-to-action, or CTA, is a button, banner, or link intended to persuade the user to click or take the desired action. Whether they’re on pricing, product, or landing pages, well-designed CTAs clarify what people will get when they click and can increase your conversions.

Card sorting is a qualitative research method used to group, label, and describe information more effectively, based on feedback from customers or users.

Think of a case study as a way to tell the story of your UX design or research project. In it, you’ll highlight the process you took to address a specific challenge you were solving for your users and customers as well as the resulting outcomes.

A Center of Excellence (CoE) refers to a team or department that develops specialized expertise and resources in a particular area, then shares that knowledge across the organization. CoEs serve as collaborative hubs for overseeing best practices, benchmarking performance, tackling problems, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. 

A centralized UX team reports to a UX manager, sometimes called the "internal agency model" or a UX center of excellence.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model that generates human-like text from user input. Learn how it works, what it does, and its limitations.

Presents participants with a static image or screenshot of a page from a site or app, before asking questions.

A cognitive walkthrough is a usability testing method where reviewers perform tasks from the user's perspective. The goal is to discern whether new users can complete tasks on an interface.

Commercial banking provides financial services to various clients, including small-to-medium-sized organizations and customers. They offer everyday banking services to consumers, like mobile banking or opening a credit card, as well as loans and lines of credit to businesses. Commercial banks profit from service fees and interest and are operated by tellers, sales teams, and branch managers. While commercial banks have historically operated from physical branches, some now function exclusively online.

Concept testing is a method of research that involves getting feedback from your customers or target audience to validate a concept before bringing it to market.

Confirmation bias occurs in UX research when teams rely on results that support their ideas or hypotheses rather than thoroughly testing them. It also happens to be a common human tendency which can make it especially challenging for teams to identify.

Context of use analysis is about understanding and analyzing your users, their tasks, and how they intend to use your product in everyday situations.

The UserTesting Contributor Network is a network of real people from more than 30 countries who opt-in to provide their perspectives on any product or experience. Their feedback is captured with the UserTesting Human Insight Platform, and typically returned in just a few hours. Our platform allows you to find the right audiences using demographic filters and custom screener questions, ensuring you receive fast high-quality feedback from your exact target audience.

Process of tweaking your website in order to increase the number of visitors who will complete a specific action on the page.

Deciding which audiences you’re getting feedback from is critical. Depending on your organization’s goals and needs, you may want to test with your own audience instead of using the UserTesting Contributor Network.

Customer activation is when customers transition into the next stage of the customer lifecycle, typically after engagement and before retention. It’s the process of a consumer realizing the value of your product and service and learning all the benefits, leading them to actively engage. It also includes re-activation, known as encouraging existing customers to begin logging into their accounts more regularly or realizing the full potential of your product. Remember, it’s too early to celebrate when customers sign up for your service or notifications. At any point, they can leave for a competitor or become confused about what you offer.

Customer empathy is focused around gaining a richer understanding of your customers—who they are, what their lives are like, how they manage their work and personal lives, and what motivates them.

There are many different definitions for CX, but at its core, it all comes down to how a person feels about the experience of interacting with your brand. Great CX is about providing a valuable, easy-to-use, and enjoyable experience to every customer, on every device, across every touchpoint—in a way that fulfills on the expectations that you set and the promises you made.

While customer experience (CX) is known as the way a user feels about interacting with your brand or product, Customer Experience Narratives (CxNs) is the dataset generated from user feedback entries received through the UserTesting platform.

Customer insights are an interpretation of trends in human behaviors which aims to uncover the underlying preferences, frustrations, and motivations of a consumer to increase the effectiveness and relevance of a product or service.

A customer journey is all the interactions a customer has with your organization before, during, and after the buying process. This includes anything from the first time they hear about your organization to noticing a billboard of your brand while driving to getting help from customer support after a purchase.

A customer journey map tells the story of your customer’s experience. From initial contact, through the various points of engagement, to the eventual long term relationship.

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing a customer to your organization’s product and ensuring a seamless experience. It also includes reacquainting users who're logging into their account for the first time in a while or being introduced to a new product feature. An onboarding experience is part of what makes up the first impression of an organization and is considered by some to be the first stage of the lifecycle, so it’s critical to get it right. Just as a book or film only has a few moments to reel you in, a great onboarding experience reinforces trust in your organization and can turn adoption into customer retention and loyalty.

Cyber insurance protects companies from hackers and other people attempting to interfere with private, protected information. It helps protect against losses from data breaches or interferences with sensitive, personally identifiable information or personal health information.

Cybersecurity, sometimes referred to as information technology security, is how organizations protect their networked technologies, information, and customer data. This includes preventing data theft or corruption, as well as damage to the organization’s hardware, software, or disruption of services.