Last month we were delighted to partner with four community members of the Conscious Marketing Movement to run a series of User Tests across the EcoSend platform.

User Testing is an invaluable resource to help direct Product strategy. In this blog-post, I’ll take you into a deep-dive on why we conduct User Testing at EcoSend, and what we learned from our sessions!

What is User Testing, and why should you do it?

User Testing involves putting your platform in the hands of end-users, and monitoring their experience, reactions, thoughts & feedback as they navigate through your product.

Why not just get feedback from your clients?

During a User Testing session, you essentially gain a window into your end-users brain, and pick up far more extensive and nuanced feedback than you might normally get from your clients.

Your clients may give great feedback, but they’re also busy.

When a modal pops-up in the wrong place, or an icon confuses them - it might be enough to detract from their efficient usage or enjoyment of the platform, but not quite enough for them to take the time to reach out to you about it.

For example, in our previous User Testing sessions, one tester remarked that the EcoSend Forms icon looked to him much more like a ‘Send Newsletter’ icon.

A great comment, and an easy fix for us to make! If he noticed it, doubtless other new users or prospects coming into the platform got confused by it too!

With User Testing sessions, your platform is completely laid bare and you receive a full spectrum of feedback from your end-users. This ranges from positive to negative, and major to nuanced.

As your end-users navigate through the desired area of your platform, they speak their thoughts out loud, giving you a window into your ideal customer profile’s mind and expectations for success using your platform.

All of this combined gives a wealth of information to escalate to your Product team.

With the direct feedback to-hand, your Product team can ensure they build out features and a roadmap which is in accurate alignment with the needs of your end-users.

The result?

Happier customers receiving regular product updates in line with their requirements, leading to improved and consistent activation of your features, better customer enjoyment of your platform, and ultimately, more secure MRR.

At EcoSend, we run User testing roughly every six months to ensure our Product remains up to date with the needs of our community.

How do you run a great User Testing session?

Picking the right testers.

First off, it’s vital your User Tests are actually the kind of people you want feedback from!

It’s no good asking a group of random people to test your Product. Their feedback could be wholly contradictory, uninformed, and distracting.

Instead, ensure you pick end users who are as close to matching your Ideal Customer Profile as possible.

This ensures their feedback will be in alignment with the needs of your customer base, and acting on any suggestions they make will likely benefit your existing and future clients.

This is why we decided to partner with Cláudia Guerreiro's Conscious Marketing Movement for our latest round of User Testing.

The Conscious Marketing Movement is an online community that brings purpose-driven entrepreneurs and conscious marketers together to learn, collaborate and make a positive impact through conscious marketing.

At EcoSend, we love working with Marketers and businesses who want to combine commercial success with being a force-for-good in the world.

Which means these community members make for ideal User Testers of our product, as who better to give feedback for a climate-conscious Marketing platform than climate-conscious Marketers!

Offering an Incentive

The folks at CMM are lovely people, but they’re also busy! It’s vital to offer an incentive to mark your appreciation of the testers taking the time to get on a call and experience your Product.

Our go-to incentive is a voucher (so the testers can make their own purchase decision) as well as planting 10 trees in our Treeapp projects.

Running the User Tests (Part 1)

Our preferred format at EcoSend is a 30-45 minute Zoom call. This can be recorded (with the testers permission) for reviewing back and taking notes later on.

On the call, we like to present a specific scenario or area of the platform to the testers which we’d like them to investigate.

For these sessions, we gave the testers the following scenario;

“Imagine you are trying out a new platform for sending a Weekly Newsletter. How would you go about testing the platform’s features, and assessing how well it met your requirements?”

User Testers are then asked to share their screen, head to EcoSend and sign-up to get started.

Running the User Tests (Part 2)

Once the test has begun, as the host of the session, I try to shut-up as much as possible..!

The key here is not to direct the user, but to have honest insight into how they would navigate the platform, were they to be by themselves.

I’ll only interject occasionally if necessary, to remind testers to keep speaking their thoughts out loud. Understandably, people can be shy!

They also don’t want to offend, so I continuously encourage them to give all feedback, especially the areas needing improvement.

After all, that’s what the session is all about, pin-pointing exactly where we need to enhance the platform, rather than patting ourselves on the back (although positive comments are welcome too!).

Next Steps - Syncing with Product

Of course, the feedback from User Tests is only as valuable as the action which follows it.

It’s no good creating a library of User Test feedback, only for it to sit gathering dust.

The next step is therefore vital - escalating the feedback to the Product Team.

At EcoSend, we have a process for this by setting a follow-up meeting between the Customer Success and Product departments.

Customer Success presents the key feedback from the sessions, followed by a discussion with Product on allocation of tasks.

Assigning Tasks & Projects

Mapping out tasks falls into the set categories below:

• Immediate fixes and quick wins

• Short-term roadmap

• Longer-term roadmap / dream-state ideas

The first category can be actioned straight away, so we divvy up tasks in Linear for the immediate fixes and quick wins.

This can range from fixing up a typo a tester spotted, to adjusting the display of a modal, or making the navigation of our Templates are more user-friendly.

The short-term roadmap ideas get placed into projects, as they require more thought, time, and resource. In order to make it into this category, the improvements are deemed of sufficient priority and immediate-value.

That leaves longer-term roadmap and dream-state ideas.

This area of feedback falls more into the bigger-picture / nice-to-have category of ideas we would eventually like to get round to, but aren’t sufficiently pressing to push to short-term roadmap.

These projects are created separately in Linear, to ensure the team can return to them at a later stage and they don’t get forgotten about.

Some of the releases we’ve already made thanks to our latest User Testing sessions include:

• Updating the ‘Advanced Options’ area in Automated Messages

• Updating the terminology of our Lead / Visitor custom statuses

• Adding a new ‘Save Draft’ button

• Changing the CTA in our Smart Group empty states

• Updating our Template navigation experience

And stay tuned on our Product Updates channel for more to come!

Wrapping Up

I hope you’ve found this a useful summary of our User Testing process here at EcoSend.

I’d highly recommend running User Testing once every six months or so, with a targeted section of your user-base, and ensuring the feedback is sent straight to your Product team to categorise and plan next steps.

A big thank you once again to the lovely people at Conscious Marketing Movement for volunteering their team - we appreciate you! 🙌

If you have any questions about running user tests, please don’t hesitate to reach out at chris@ecosend.io

Thanks for reading!