UserTesting needed granular visibility into user experience, unlimited access to data, and unopinionated reporting. Keen delivered all three in a user-friendly interface that provided high value in a short amount of time
With over 34,000 customers, UserTesting is the industry leader in user testing and research. The company has a network of testers who record real-time reviews of user flows, providing product teams with robust audio, visual, and written feedback in as little as an hour. Additionally, UserTesting’s research team helps its customers improve their user testing practices and craft long-term research plans to ensure ongoing, iterative improvements to clients’ websites and apps.
The Challenge
We had several related needs: to better understand the customer experience, to maintain access to our own data, and to perform extensive arbitrary analysis, all while maintaining an easy-to-use interface for business users. Keen gave us everything we were looking for.
UserTesting helps companies improve user experience, so a thorough understanding and plan for improving their own users’ experience was a top priority. The company needed to parse a wide-ranging data set reflecting their users’ experience, as well as precise analytic tools, including unique features that prescriptive third-party analytics solutions couldn’t handle. With a small data team serving half a dozen product teams, UserTesting also needed a user-friendly solution that would allow product managers and business owners to run queries with minimal support. UserTesting’s requirements included:
- The ability to pull extensive metrics on video engagement and potential points of failure
- Unlimited access to data being collected
- Total flexibility on how to query the data
- Faster implementation and higher dependability than an in-house solution could provide
- Front-end easy enough for business users to take advantage of
If it were our own service, we’d have to maintain it. Inevitably it would crash, and then we’d be responsible for lost data. There’s no way an in-house solution would have provided the same reliability or performance we’ve seen from Keen.
The Solution
We can send any data to Keen, and the interface simply reflects it back. Keen doesn’t impose its own ideas of what our data should look like. It lets us define exactly what we want and allows us to get it back very easily and very fast.
Keen helped UserTesting implement the Data Explorer workbench, including custom dashboards that could be easily queried by different teams. UserTesting now has complete access to all its original data, but with a fuller picture of how its customers use its products, helping drive prioritization and goals.
- Keen’s flexible data model allows the team to investigate any metric, from product performance to user behavior.
- Using APIs, the data science team can run advanced analytics through Redshift.
- The team can programmatically combine event data from Keen with entity data from other sources.
- UserTesting can track mobile behavior, previously a blind spot.
The Impact
“Keen helps us define metrics and prioritize. It helps us see where our customers are not succeeding. When we build features with the goal of making a user’s life easier, Keen helps us understand if we’ve succeeded.”
Today, UserTesting is practicing what it preaches by applying precise data toward the best possible experience for its customers. With Keen, UserTesting gets the insight it needs to:
- Understand exactly how users engage with products at every stage
- Allow product and business teams to run their own queries without the data team becoming a bottleneck
- Uncover previously undetected points of failure or drop-off so they can make fixes fast
- Prioritize development resources to build the features users most want and need
Keen has become core to how we think about developing and releasing products; we are now capable of understanding customer usage so that we can make the best decisions.
