Just last week, we announced our acquisition of the usability testing company TryMyUI and we are all very excited for what's coming next. We had an opportunity to dig in and get some dirt from the young and vibrant Founder and Product Manager Ritvij Gautam (you can call him Rit) about what this means for him and what's coming next for TryMyUI.
In case you missed out earlier, TryMyUI is a usability testing platform that enables companies to access very interactive, narrative walkthrough videos of their online user experience.
The pre-qualified testers on board with TryMyUI are properly trained to give this very rich, qualitative, behavioral data and feedback to not only confirm where things are looking great, but also suggest where improvements should be made.
Along with our Q&A enclosed later in this post, you can also listen to the Podcast recorded last week with Rit to learn more about TryMyUI and the vision moving forward. A big thanks to Clark Buckner (Twitter) and the fantastic team at TechnologyAdvice for taking the time to interview include us!
Q1: Tell us a little bit about your professional background and TryMyUI prior to joining Survey Analytics.
I am a Physics and Philosophy Dual major from Claremont McKenna College. Most of my corporate experience has been centered around Quality Assurance. I briefly worked at Lam Research's Global Quality department. This is where I developed an interest UI and usability testing. TryMyUI is a crowdsourced remote UI usability tester. We started as an experiment to see if we can rightly harness the knowledge of the masses and channel it to provide affordable and keen analysis of User Interfaces. We believe that by allowing users to test from their homes, we are giving customers the ability to observe the most candid user-experience one can have with their product.
Q2: We heard that only 10% of received applications for testers go through.
Can you tell us a little more about the qualification process? This is correct. It is crucial for us that testers put themselves in the frame of mind of someone actually using the product, and vocalize their process. This is the only way our customers can "get the user's view" and essentially see the purpose behind every user action. Hence we stringently grade our testers on their ability to use a UI as an engaged user, interested in the product being tested, as opposed to a random person at a coffee shop who is just "checking out" the software.
Q3: Tell us about how you both recruit and train testers to make in-depth walkthroughs about the user interface.
We make all applicants take a qualification test that is just like the real test in all aspects. This test is then graded by our graders(consistently 5 star testers) for criteria like clarity of speech, critical ability, completion of tasks, style of feedback. Post qual test, users are issued a score out of 5 stars. This score determines their likeliness of receiving tests and changes with every actual test they take. This keeps our testers competitive and makes sure our customers only get the most useful behavioral feedback.
Q4: Besides the obvious need for this behavioral data and qualitative approach in SaaS and E-commerce businesses, what other businesses/industries have utilized the services offered by TryMyUI?
I think that TryMyUI is very versatile. We had the Bureau of Labor Statistics use us to test the efficacy of their surveys. This was an interesting, as they were using us to get "meta-feedback" or, feedback on their mode of collecting feedback. I think that TryMyUI can not only be used to test the UI of your product but also do some poignant market research by analyzing the UI of your competitors to see what users are gravitating towards and why.
Q5: How do businesses typically analyze and what steps are taken to quantify the video responses?
Bigger companies have a dedicated UI/UX department that sit and watch the videos that are generate a report of the feedback. This is a crucial but time consuming activity. To allow smaller companies to have access to the same level of analysis without sacrificing the same amount time, we have partnered with The UX department to offer an "Expert Analysis." It is a 10 test bundle that a professional UX consultant will analyze and generate a detailed report for the customer with. We are also working on including more quantitative analysis in our product so that TryMyUI can become a one stop shop for quantitative and qualitative UI testing and analysis.
Q6: What's next for TryMyUI in the product roadmap?
The great thing about having a video with user vocalization is it renders a lot of tools like heat maps and click tracking redundant. I no longer have to guess why the user is hovering their mouse over that particular spot because the user is telling you the exact reason. Hence we have been able to focus on adding features that will bolster our already powerful tool. Most recently, we have been consulting with usability experts to create an objective score for UI usability. This will allow our customers to focus on key metrics when improving and re-testing their UI. We are also going to leverage survey analytics to better curate the demographics of our testers so that customers can hone in on the target market they want to test against. This will beautifully dovetail quantitative and qualitative analysis to give insights that no one kind of analysis would be able to provide alone. The holy grail in our product roadmap is achieving comprehensive cross-platform testing which can be analyzed with all of our tools to make us the leader in UI testing and analysis.
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