Overview

As UX design matures into a staple within the tech field, and is seen as more legitimate by more companies, a plethora of UX research and design tools have been created to help UXers design better experiences.

Recently, I was reached out to by a team member over at UXtweak, and was asked if I’d like to do a review on their UX platform.

To that end, if you’re looking for a solid, robust tool-set for your UX research and design efforts, here is my absolutely dead honest review of UXtweak, what it is, and why you may want to consider it as part of your UX workflow.

What is UXtweak?

UXtweak is essentially an all-in-one UX research platform that offers a surprising amount of the testing features that you really need in order to thoroughly research your both your users, and their experiences with your product.

From card sorting to prototype testing and essentially everything in between, they’ve pretty much got you covered on the most impactful tests that you and your team would normally administer to garner actionable user data.

How is it different?

What really strikes me as different about UXtweak versus all the other options out there is just how well their feature set is delineated for achieving specific results.

I could go on about this forever, but many platforms out there lack the cohesion of features geared towards explicit results that UXtweak offers right out of the gate.

What’s refreshing is that UXtweak isn’t like staring down Google Analytics, you don’t feel like you’re at the helm of some giant battleship; the system feels nimble, responsive, and focuses specifically on helping you get the data that you need, without making rash or wild assumptions about what it thinks you’re “trying” to get.

Key advantages

Some of the major advantages that I like about UXtweak are:

1. The interface is clean, well-designed, and easy to work with.
2. The testing methodologies are consistent, well-defined, and are simple to setup.
3. The pricing structure is incredibly transparent, and they’re not trying to hide anything from you.
4. They also have an enterprise option which offers a whole other range of features which, in many ways, go vastly above and beyond other testing suites.
5. Recruiting participants from a user panel for specific studies is built into the platform, and the pricing for each is generally pretty reasonable, though you can definitely bring your own users as well, no worries there.

But by far one of the greatest advantages that UXtweak offers in terms of features is being able to test a mobile app remotely and gather usability data without much, if any, researcher intervention.

Mobile App Usability Testing

Quite possibly one of the bigger game-changers I’ve seen come out on any UX testing platform, UXtweak recently released a feature which allows you and your team to test your apps that are in the app store or testflight, websites/apps, or presentational prototypes in a much more unified way.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but essentially using both the app you’re looking to test, and UXtweak’s companion app, you can test your application natively on the user’s device, remotely, in order to gather specific, granular usability data.

This approach can allow teams to see what users are doing, when they’re doing it, while allowing users to give feedback throughout the process.

Think of it a lot like a contextual interview or 1:1 usability study, but on the user’s actual device, fully remote, and essentially completely automated. Sounds pretty good right?

The good

Where this feature really shines is if you have a specific app with specific features that you’re looking to test across multiple users in different time-zones and under different usage circumstances.

What’s really cool about this is that it decouples the researcher’s time from the participant’s time, which allows a researcher to essentially be in several places at once.

You specify the app, you write the test(s), you deploy it to your users, they move through the tests at their own pace, and when they’re done, you get the feedback that you’re looking for, all without ever having to interface with your users directly.

This is a huge advantage for several reasons that I’ll touch more on here in a minute.

The bad

The only real downside that I could find with this approach is that, because your users will need to install both your app and the UXtweak app, it may be somewhat clunky for users who aren’t prepared for that level of testing overhead.

Essentially what we’re doing here is assuming that our testing users are savvy enough to follow the instructions that they’re given by the platform. That said, I will admit, especially in this day and age, most users are gonna know exactly how to make that happen.

HOWEVER, if you are testing with older/non-technical demos, psychogs, or behavioral targets, you’ll probably want to make sure they’ve either at least been briefed on how to make it happen and understand how the process works in detail, or, preferentially, give them a device to test on that has been setup for testing specifically to reduce that cognitive load.

It’s worth pointing out that users in the wild typically will not download another app in order to use your app, so this particular testing methodology represents and analogue of their experience, rather than the experience itself.

Not a bad thing necessarily, just something to keep in mind.

The bottom line on UXtweak

So what does this all mean for you? Suffice it to say that I would definitely recommend UXtweak to and for any UX designer or design teams that are looking to up the ante in their UXR game.

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Overall, I would give UXtweak a 9/10 for flexibility, completeness, and ease of implementation, with my only real concern being possible testing overhead for mobile app users.

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One major advantage of a platform like UXtweak is that it can almost completely remove the bias of researcher intervention from studies (which is incredibly common), while simultaneously serving to mitigate The Hawthorne Effect, which has always been a problem with traditional UX research methods.

Regardless, trying the platform is free for designers and they do have a fairly generous free tier which can allow you to make your own assessment for both feature set and overall fit within your design team’s workflow.

Hands-down UXtweak is one of the better testing platforms that I’ve seen to date, and I think we can expect to see even more robust features offered by them in the days to come.