Every year millions of products and services hit the market with sky-high aspirations, and every year millions of those same products and services fail. The reason? Consumer expectations are rising, which means their tolerance for a bad experience, has all but disappeared.
“We tend to remember the good experiences that we have, and that creates expectations across all other similar or comparable experiences,” Van De Loo said. “This was something we saw a lot of — the first experience with a new platform determines whether they’re going to work with them in the future or not. The bar keeps rising. It keeps getting higher and higher. Especially with these newer experiences.”
Kaj Van De Loo is the CTO of UserTesting, a human insight platform that provides companies with the opportunity to gather real-time feedback, from real customers, regardless of where an item stands within the development process. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Kaj joins me for a conversation centered on how UserTesting is creating real-time feedback loops based on the emotions and interactions real people experience with a product. Plus, Kaj goes under the hood and explains how UserTesting is using these insights to create actionable insights for their clients.
Main Takeaways
- So Simple Even I Can Use It: Consumers are now evaluating a product or service on everything from design, to pick-up and drop-off location, but the number one thing that is making or breaking a consumer’s experience is overall ease of use. Products or services that have more steps to reach the same conclusion as a product that had a similar, more streamlined approach, always received negative feedback.
- Jury by Your Peers: One of the biggest influences in how new platforms are being evaluated now is based upon the experience shoppers have on a similar website. If a user has a tremendous shopping experience on a website such as Amazon, they are now more likely to evaluate a new platform based with the good experience setting a new bar. This means that first impressions, especially for new websites, are now more important than ever before.
- Can I Get Your Feedback?: By deploying an online community of verified users and testers, UserTesting has been able to create more accurate feedback loops that can be iterated and retested in real-time. By using humans instead of various testing services, clients can gauge how an individual interacts and connects with a site, while detailing what they like and don’t like about each product.
For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.
Article
Every year millions of products and services hit the market with sky-high aspirations, and every year millions of those same products and services fail. The reason? Consumer expectations are rising, which means their tolerance for a bad experience, has all but disappeared.
Kaj Van De Loo is the CTO of UserTesting, a human insight platform that provides companies with the opportunity to gather real-time feedback, from real customers, regardless of where an item stands within the development process. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Kaj joins me for a conversation centered on how UserTesting is creating real-time feedback loops based on the emotions and interactions real people experience with a product. Plus, Kaj goes under the hood and explains how UserTesting is using these insights to create actionable insights for their clients.
With UserTesting, companies have the freedom to provide their own focus groups or pull from a group of individuals around the world who can sign-up and begin testing products at any time. To support these various focus groups, UserTesting utilizes a handful of tools within its tech stack to catalog a user’s experience with a product, record their feedback and then distribute the most impactful aspects of that feedback to the client.
“There’s a lot of technology involved in this whole process of getting to the interesting moments that matter to understand how you can improve the experience you’re providing,” Van De Loo said.”We try to target these tests so that the participants who are most interested, and the most likely to be good testers, we target them with the particular test. There’s a lot of technology already in just how you find your audience. And there’s a lot of interesting technology of how the experience gets recorded.”
Those experiences are recorded in real-time by using actual individuals over video. From there the user has the ability to try a product or platform first-hand and record their step-by-step feedback. Those interactions can include anything from the look and feel of a platform, all the way through the number of steps it takes for someone to complete a transaction.
While the process sounds quick and easy, the technological steps that are required to record the video, digest the file size, and then turn around lengthy videos in order to provide actionable insights to a client is not.
“ If you get just five, 15 minute videos back, that’s a lot of time for you to sit, listen and watch through all of those,” Van De Loo said. “That’s where we apply a lot of machine learning. We transcribe everything that people say. We analyze the transcripts for strong emotions. We pick out interesting moments. All of this then compliments what they actually said, and it helps guide you toward the highlights, and we can automatically create a highlight reel for them.”
Real-time feedback is one of the most important steps to fixing a problem in a timely manner, but not all testers are created equal and therefore not all feedback should be used as a north star. There are other outside forces constantly at play in how people review something, so it’s wise to take in the full picture and raise the bar as needed.
“We tend to remember the good experiences that we have and that creates expectations across all other similar or comparable experiences,” Van De Loo said. “ The first experience with a new platform determines whether they’re going to work with them in the future or not. The bar keeps rising. It keeps getting higher and higher. Especially with these newer experiences.”
To hear about how consumer expectations continue to rise and the way that UserTesting is utilizing their platform to deliver real-time results, check out the full episode of IT Visionaries.
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To hear the entire discussion, tune into IT Visionaries here.
