Efficient Research: Maximizing the ROI of Understanding Your Customers

The user research landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years, but not all of the platforms in the space have kept pace with each other. One of the biggest options in the market, UserTesting is a clear example of that. Optimal's customers choose us because UserTesting relies on legacy infrastructure and has outdated pricing models, whereas they feel that Optimal represents the next generation of research platforms, built for modern teams that are prioritizing agility, insight quality, and value.

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What are the biggest differences between Optimal and UserTesting?

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Cost

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• ‍UserTesting is Expensive: UserTesting charges $5,000-$10,000 per user annually plus additional session-based fees, creating unpredictable costs that escalate the more research your team does. This means that teams often face budget surprises when conducting longer studies or more frequent research.‍
• Optimal has Transparent Pricing: Optimal offers flat-rate pricing without per-seat fees or session units, enabling teams to scale research sustainbly. Our transparent pricing eliminates budget surprises and enables predictable research ops planning.

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Return on Investment

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• Justifying the Cost of UserTesting: UserTesting's high costs and complex pricing structure make it hard to prove the ROI, particularly for teams conducting frequent research or extended studies that trigger additional session fees.
• The Best Value in the Market: Optimal's straightforward pricing and comprehensive feature set deliver measurable ROI. We offer 90% of the features that UserTesting provides at 10% of the price.

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Technology Evolution

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• UserTesting is Struggling to Modernize: UserTesting's platform shows signs of aging infrastructure, with slower performance and difficulty integrating modern research methodologies. Their technology advancement has lagged behind industry innovation.
• Optimal is Purpose-Built for Modern Research: Optimal has invested heavily over the last few years in features for contemporary research needs, including AI-powered analysis and automation capabilities.

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UserZoom Integration Challenges

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• UserZoom Integration Challenges: UserTesting's acquisition of UserZoom has created platform challenges that continue to impact user experience. UserTesting customers report confusion navigating between legacy systems and inconsistent feature availability and quality.
• Built by Researchers for Researchers: Optimal has built from the ground up a single, cohesive platform without the complexity of merged acquisitions, ensuring consistent user experience and seamless workflow integration.

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Participant Panel Quality

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• Poor Quality, In-House Panel: UserTesting's massive scale has led to participant quality issues, with researchers reporting difficulty finding high-quality participants for specialized research needs and inconsistent participant engagement.
• Flexibility = Quality: Optimal prioritizes flexibility for our users, allowing our customers to bring their own participants for free or use our high-quality panels, with over 100+ million verified participants across 150+ countries who meet strict quality standards.

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Customer Support Experience

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• Impersonal, Enterprise Support: Users report that UserTesting's large organizational structure creates slower support cycles, outsourced customer service, and reduced responsiveness to individual customer needs.‍
• Agile, Personal Support: At Optimal we pride ourselves on our fast, human support with dedicated account management and direct access to product teams, ensuring fast and personalized support.

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The Future of User Research Platforms

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The research platform landscape has evolved from basic testing tools and legacy systems to comprehensive user insight platforms. Today, teams responsible for reserach require platforms that have evolved to include:

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• Advanced Analytics: AI-powered analysis that transforms data into actionable insights
• Flexible Recruitment: Options for both BYO, panel and custom participant recruitment
• Transparent Pricing: Predictable costs that scale with your needs
• Responsive Development: Platforms that evolve based on user feedback and industry trends

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Platforms Need to Evolve for Modern Research Needs

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When selecting a vendor, teams need to choose a platform with the functionality that their teams need today, but also one that will also grow with the needs of your team in the future. Scalable, adaptable platforms enable research teams to:

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• Scale Efficiently: Grow research activities without exponential cost increaeses
• Embrace Innovation: Integrate new research methodologies and analysis techniques as well as emerging tools like AI 
• Maintain Standards: Ensure consistent participant, data and tool quality as the platform evolves
• Stay Responsive: Adapt to changing business needs and market conditions

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Research teams today need platforms that have successfully adapted to contemporary challenges: cost efficiency, rapid user insight and seamless workflow integration. The key is choosing a platform that continues to evolve rather than one constrained by outdated infrastructure and complex, legacy pricing models.

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Ready to see how leading brands including Lego, Netflix and Nike achieve better research outcomes? Experience how Optimal's platform delivers user insights that adapt to your team's growing needs.

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Simply put, ResearchOps is about making sure your research operations are robust, thought through and managed. 

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Having systems and processes around your UX research and your team keep everyone (and everything) organized. Making user research projects quicker to get started and more streamlined to run. And robust sharing, socializing, and knowledge storage means that everyone can understand the research insights and findings and put these to use - across the organization. And even better, find these when they need them. 

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Using the same tools across the team allows the research team to learn from each other, and previous research projects and be able to compare apples with apples, with everyone included. Bringing the team together across tools, research and results.

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We go into more detail in our ebook ResearchOps Checklist about exactly what you can do to make sure your research team is running at its best. Let’s take a quick look at 5 way to ensure you have the grounding for a successful ResearchOps team.

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1. Knowledge management 📚

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What do you do with all of the insights and findings of a user research project? How do you store them, how do you manage the insights, and how do you share and socialize?

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Having processes in place that manage this knowledge is important to the longevity of your research. From filing to sharing across platforms, it all needs to be standardized so everyone can search, find and share.

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2. Guidelines and process templates 📝

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Providing a framework for how to run research projects is are important. Building on the knowledge base from previous research can improve research efficiencies and cut down on groundwork and administration. Making research projects quicker and more streamlined to get underway.

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3. Governance 🏛

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User research is all about people, real people. It is incredibly important that any research be legal, safe, and ethical. Having effective governance covered is vital.

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4. Tool stack 🛠

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Every research team needs a ‘toolbox’ that they can use whenever they need to run card sorts, tree tests, usability tests, user interviews, and more. But which software and tools to use?

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Making sure that the team is using the same tools also helps with future research projects, learning from previous projects, and ensuring that the information is owned and run by the organization (rather than whichever individuals prefer). Reduce logins and password shares, and improve security with organization-wide tools and platforms. 

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5. Recruitment 👱🏻👩👩🏻👧🏽👧🏾

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Key to great UX research is the ability to recruit quality participants - fast! Having strong processes in place for screening, scheduling, sampling, incentivizing, and managing participants needs to be top of the list when organizing the team.

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Wrap Up 💥

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Each of these ResearchOps processes are not independent of the other. And neither do they flow from one to the other. They are part of a total wrap around for the research team, creating processes, systems and tools that are built to serve the team. Allowing them to focus on the job of doing great research and generating insights and findings that develop the very best user experience. 

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Afterall, we are creating user experiences that keep our users engaged and coming back. Why not look at the teams user experience and make the most of that. Freeing time and space to socialize and share the findings with the organization. 

Knowing and understanding why and how your users use your product can be invaluable for getting to the nitty gritty of usability. Where they get stuck and where they fly through. Delving deep with probing questions into motivation or skimming over looking for issues can equally be informative.

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Usability testing can be done in several ways, each way has its benefits. Put super simply, usability testing literally is testing how useable your product is for your users. If your product isn't useable users will not stick around or very often complete their task, let alone come back for more.

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What is usability testing? 🔦

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Usability testing is a research method used to evaluate how easy something is to use by testing it with representative users.

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These tests typically involve observing a participant as they work through a series of tasks involving the product being tested. Having conducted several usability tests, you can analyze your observations to identify the most common issues.

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We go into the three main methods of usability testing:

1. Moderated and unmoderated
2. Remote or in person
3. Explorative, assessment or comparative

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1. Moderated or unmoderated usability testing 👉👩🏻💻

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Moderated usability testing is done in-person or remotely by a researcher who introduces the test to participants, answers their queries, and asks follow-up questions. Often these tests are done in real time with participants and can involve other research stakeholders. Moderated testing usually produces more in-depth results thanks to the direct interaction between researchers and test participants. However, this can be expensive to organize and run.

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Top tip: Use moderated testing to investigate the reasoning behind user behavior.

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Unmoderated usability testing is done without direct supervision; likely participants are in their own homes and/or using their own devices to browse the website that is being tested. And often at their own pace.  The cost of unmoderated testing is lower, though participant answers can remain superficial and making follow-up questions can be difficult.

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Top tip: Use unmoderated testing to test a very specific question or observe and measure behavior patterns.

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2. Research or in-person usability testing 🕵

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Remote usability testing is done over the internet or by phone. Allowing the participants to have the time and space to work in their own environment and at their own pace. This however doesn’t give the researcher much in the way of contextual data because you’re unable to ask questions around intention or probe deeper if the participant makes a particular decision. Remote testing doesn’t go as deep into a participant’s reasoning, but it allows you to test large numbers of people in different geographical areas using fewer resources.

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Top tip: Use remote testing when a large group of participants are needed and the questions asked can be direct and unambiguous.

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In-person usability testing, as the name suggests, is done in the presence of a researcher. In-person testing does provide contextual data as researchers can observe and analyze body language and facial expressions. You’re also often able to converse with participants and find out more about why they do something. However, in-person testing can be expensive and time-consuming: you have to find a suitable space, block out a specific date, and recruit (and often pay) participants.

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Top tip: In-person testing gives researchers more time and insight into motivation for decisions.

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3. Explorative, Assessment or comparative testing 🔍

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These three usability testing methods generate different types of information:

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Explorative testing is open-ended. Participants are asked to brainstorm, give opinions, and express emotional impressions about ideas and concepts. The information is typically collected in the early stages of product development and helps researchers pinpoint gaps in the market, identify potential new features, and workshop new ideas.

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Assessment research is used to test a user's satisfaction with a product and how well they are able to use it. It's used to evaluate general functionality.

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Comparative research methods involve asking users to choose which of two solutions they prefer, and they may be used to compare a product with its competitors.

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Top tip: Depending on what research is being done, and how much qualitative or quantitative data is wanted.

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Which method is right for you? 🧐

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Whether the testing is done in-person, remote, moderated or unmoderated will depend on your purpose, what you want out of the testing, and to some extent your budget. 

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Depending on what you are testing, each of the usability testing methods we explored here can offer an answer. If you are at the development stage of a product it can be useful to conduct a usability test on the entire product. Checking the intuitive usability of your website, to ensure users can make the best decisions, quickly. Or adding, changing or upgrading a product can also be the moment to check on a specific question around usability. Planning and understanding your objectives are key to selecting the right usability testing option for your project.

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Let's take a look at a couple of examples of usability testing.

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1. Lab based, in-person moderated testing - mid-life website

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Imagine you have a website that sells sports equipment. Over time your site has become cluttered and disorganized, much like a bricks and mortar store may. You’ve noticed a drop in sales in certain areas. How do you find out what is going wrong or where users are getting lost? Having an in-person, lab (or other controlled environment), moderated usability test with users you can set tasks, watch (and record) what they do.

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The researcher can literally be standing or sitting next to the participant throughout, recording contextual information such as how they interacted with the mouse, laptop or even the seat. Watching for cues as to the comfort of the participant and asking questions about why they make decisions can provide richer insights. Maybe they wanted purple yoga pants, but couldn’t find the ‘yoga’ section which was listed under gym rather than a clothing section.

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Meaning you can look at how your stock is organised, or even investigate undertaking a card sort. This provides robust and fully rounded feedback on users behaviours, expectations and experiences. Providing data that can directly be turned into actionable directives when redeveloping the website. 

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2. Remote, moderated assessment testing - app product development

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You are looking at launching an app for parents to access for information and updates for the school. It’s still in development stage and at this point you want to know how easy the app is to use. Setting some very specific set tasks for participants to complete the app can be sent to them and they can be left to complete (or not). Providing feedback and comments around the usability.

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The next step may be to use first click testing to see how and where the interface is clicked and where participants may be spending time, or becoming lost. Whilst the feedback and data gathered from this testing can be light, it will be very direct to the questions asked. And will provide data to back up (or possibly not) what assumptions were made.

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3. Moderated, In-person, explorative testing - new product development

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You’re right at the start of the development process. The idea is new and fresh and the basics are being considered. What better way to get an understanding of what your users’ truly want than an explorative study.

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Open-ended questions with participants in a one-on-one environment (or possibly in groups) can provide rich data and insights for the development team. Imagine you have an exciting new promotional app that you are developing for a client. There are similar apps on the market but none as exciting as what your team has dreamt up. By putting it (and possibly the competitors) to participants they can give direct feedback on what they like, love and loathe.

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They can also help brainstorm ideas or better ways to make the app work, or improve the interface. All of this done, before there is money sunk in development.

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Wrap up 🌯

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Key objectives will dictate which usability testing method will deliver the answers to your questions.

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Whether it’s in-person, remote, moderated or comparative with a bit of planning you can gather data around your users very real experience of your product. Identify issues, successes and failures. Addressing your user experience with real data, and knowledge can but lead to a more intuitive product.