Optimizing user experience: using Pendo and UserTesting to achieve your product management goals

As a product manager for an on-demand human insight platform, it’s safe to say I have a solid grasp of how important it is to incorporate customer feedback into all stages of product development. At UserTesting, we’re constantly using our own platform to gather human insights (“eating our own dogfood” or “drinking our own champagne” as some would say) and like many of our customers, we often combine UserTesting capabilities with other business tools, leveraging synergistic technologies to better understand the customer journey. 

When we recently signed on with Pendo, I was super excited to start exploring how our platforms could be used together to deliver complementary quantitative and qualitative datasets. My primary responsibilities are centered around customer engagement, increasing usage and adoption, and finding opportunities to improve user experiences. In the current dynamic environment where empathizing with your customers is more important than ever, I wanted to deploy UserTesting and Pendo to get a better understanding of our new users’ experiences. 

Here’s how I did it: 

1. 1. I started off by creating a UserTesting test (using “My Recruit” so I could target UserTesting customers) designed to capture information on our new users, their familiarity with user research, details of their first platform experience, and any challenges or pain points they may have encountered. After launching the test, I copied the unique test link and made my way to the Pendo platform. 
   2. The next step was creating a Pendo Guide informing users of the opportunity to provide feedback via a UserTesting unmoderated video session. I pasted my test link into the Guide, and used Pendo’s segmenting feature to limit exposure of the Guide to users that had been created within the last 7 days. 
   3. Lastly, I activated my Pendo Guide and waited for the results to begin flowing in. Best practices dictate a sample size of about 5 participants for this type of test, so once I received 5 responses I logged back into Pendo and de-activated the Guide.

Now for the fun part – equipped with detailed, qualitative feedback from our new users, I was able to view these insights alongside the quantitative analytical data that Pendo delivers. This gave me the information I needed to not only understand what behaviors our new users were exhibiting but why and how they were exhibiting them. 

For example, we found that one user, who had actually used UserTesting at a previous company, was having trouble setting up their test demographics. Despite giving positive feedback on our recently upgraded dashboard, the user was unfamiliar with the new navigation and had never previously been responsible for defining test demographics. We’re now using this information to improve our onboarding services, and also to create a new in-product onboarding experience by delivering UserTesting pro tips via Pendo guides.

When you have access to a 360-degree view of your customers’ experiences, you can empower your organization to innovate and iterate more efficiently through informed, customer-centric decision making. Check out Pendo’s UserTesting Recipe: Gain Real Human Insights on New Features and try this solution yourself!