Real-world usability testing examples

By now, you’re aware of the importance of usability testing. It’s essential to determine how users interact with your product and create a digital experience that the user understands and enjoys. 

One of the best ways to get a feel for usability testing is to see it in practice. This chapter will delve into some practical usability testing examples from some of UserTesting’s customers. These product, research, and design teams’ success with usability testing offers real-world inspiration for how others might follow in their footsteps.

Usability testing GymShark’s app to increase checkout by 11%

The challenge

Founded in 2012, UK-based Gymshark has always prioritized customer feedback. Initially conducting product and design tests, the company later partnered with UserTesting to enhance their digital touchpoints, including apps. 

This collaboration aimed to align the perspectives of product owners and engineering teams with customer-driven insights on Gymshark's online strategy. Initially seeking a comprehensive understanding of the purchase process, Gymshark's focus shifted to specific aspects such as shipping, payment, and delivery, and eventually to improving product findability to facilitate a smoother checkout experience.

Testing 

Gymshark initially conducted in-depth interviews to assess perceptions of their digital spaces, followed by unmoderated usability tests through UserTesting’s Contributor Network, targeting users of competitor apps. This helped them understand how customers view their website elements, banners, and overall brand. Maxwell Petitjean, Gymshark’s Head of Product Insights, noted the significant improvement in test usability and response quality with UserTesting. Insights from these tests were presented to senior Design and Product Management teams. Subsequently, the Head of Product Management directed further research into how customers choose sizes during the purchase process, aiming to boost sales and customer satisfaction.

The results

Petitjean revealed that within a month of using UserTesting, they learned customers often left Gymshark's site to check reviews before purchasing, prompting them to simplify keeping items in carts while browsing elsewhere. This change led to an 11% increase in checkout rates. Additionally, after A/B testing, Gymshark made their sizing guide more prominent, resulting in a 40% increase in its use within six weeks. They also improved their training app after discovering users had difficulty creating workout plans, which doubled the app's user base in one month.

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Usability testing to competitively benchmark American Airlines’ digital experience

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The challenge

Most flyers now book their flights online, making the digital experience crucial for customer satisfaction and retention. American Airlines, transporting around half a million passengers daily and attracting hundreds of millions of website visitors annually, faces a wide audience and has significant UX challenges. Despite being a large organization, American Airlines needed a better way to measure and improve their digital product experiences. Integrating UserTesting into their workflow provided the necessary tools to quantify, benchmark, and demonstrate progress effectively.

Testing

Lucas Lemasters, UX Research Principal at American Airlines, stated that UserTesting offers essential quantitative and qualitative data for product decision-making. The effectiveness of UserTesting is especially evident in American's benchmarking programs, where it collaborates with Research Consultants to utilize QXscore. This proprietary metric assesses both the usability and enjoyment of digital experiences, guiding product decisions and success.

American Airlines put its entire sequence of digital experiences for searching and booking flights in front of potential customers with UserTesting, and then they quantified the usability and enjoyment of their website by QXscoring four key customer experiences:

• Booking a flight
• Changing and managing a flight
• Checking in for a flight
• The AAdvantage program

For the benchmarking programs, they measured the performance of their digital experiences against the same experiences from competing airlines, carefully tracking every conceivable engagement a customer could have when using the American Airlines website. 

The results

American’s UX team provides QXscores to the organization’s product owners. This gives the teams a common, quantifiable metric to track success over time. The teams share the related data sets and provide a common set of measures to senior executives, to justify their decisions. 

Kimberly Cisek, VP of Customer Experience, says, “Without human insight, you may become reliant on data that is static. What you really want to know is how the customers are using and engaging with the functions that you put out there for them.” 

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Usability testing increases Calm’s research speed by 10x

The challenge

When Chase Clark joined Calm as the company’s first UX research hire, he sought to understand more deeply how the app can help people target more than just sleep and meditation, addressing their stress and anxiety on a deeper level. To evaluate and anticipate customer behaviors, Calm’s research team had to function like a team of many.

Chase, now Calm’s Lead UX Researcher, shares more. “I inherited the UserTesting account and was super excited because I had worked with the platform before. I can act like multiple researchers and still be just one person without stretching myself too thin. The research that would have taken me ten business days now takes me two.” 

Testing

Chase Clark, Calm's Lead UX Researcher, capitalized on UserTesting's platform to efficiently conduct generative research by engaging diverse participants quickly. This approach allowed the team to transition from basic usability tests to in-depth studies on user interactions with stress and anxiety, significantly reducing research time from 10 days to two. 

The insights gained led to developing a new progress tracker in the Calm app, designed to encourage users to engage in mental health activities as regularly as physical exercise. This tracker, tested and optimized through UserTesting, aligns with user expectations and abilities, helping users set and achieve weekly wellness goals.

The results 

UserTesting’s value extends beyond research efficiency and effectiveness to helping Calm’s engineering teams. By testing concepts and prototypes directly on the platform, Calm quickly identifies the most promising ideas. Receiving feedback early in the product development lifecycle allows the company to avoid investing months of effort into features and concepts that won’t resonate with their users. The ability to quickly iterate and receive feedback from diverse participants helps Calm prioritize data-driven decisions over emotional ones. 

Overall, Calm has leveraged UserTesting to understand its users better and fulfill its mission of helping people achieve better mental wellness. 

“It really has been a key player in helping us understand the murky but massive field of mental wellness. It's a difficult area for research, especially with a small team. We wouldn't be able to do half the stuff we've done without this platform.”