UserZoom’s Total Economic Impact report yields impressive cost savings and business benefits

UserZoom today announced the results of a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of UserZoom, examining the return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize with UserZoom’s comprehensive user research software, professional services, and participant sourcing for user experience (UX) researchers and product teams.

Forrester’s interviews with four existing customers and subsequent financial analysis found that organizations can expect a 537% ROI with total benefits of $2,253,297 over three years, and an investment payback time of under 6 months.

Forrester took a comprehensive approach to evaluate the impact that UserZoom had on these enterprises. Specifically, it interviewed UserZoom subject matter experts, Forrester analysts, and four enterprise organizations currently using UserZoom and constructed a financial model representative of the interview using the TEI methodology. The objective of the framework was to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility and risk factors that affect the investment decision.

Forrester interviewed Cisco and three other enterprise organizations who understand that user experience is essential to their long-term success, but struggled with several key challenges:

• Lab research studies (primarily in-person moderated usability tests) were costly and extremely time-consuming.
• User research was too slow to be integrated into the agile development process.
• International research was even more expensive and time-consuming.
• Lab research lacked quantitative strength, limiting organizational acceptance and investment.
• Manual analysis of research lacked the consistency and significance required to conduct benchmarking research.
• Sourcing quality participants was expensive and time-consuming, and specialized participants were difficult to recruit.

To address these challenges, these organizations searched for an innovative user research solution that could: provide a comprehensive platform with advanced capabilities such as user videos, click tracking, heat maps, surveys, and benchmarking; enable researchers to conduct concurrent studies with less effort and enable non-researchers to conduct studies; automate aspects of quantitative analysis and reporting with visual reports and dashboards; reduce the time required for qualitative analysis with tagging and exporting of user video highlight reels; and a solution that could act as a partner and provide flexible professional services to augment internal resources.

“Our researchers could not handle the volume of research we need without UserZoom,” said the Head of Consumer Analytics at one of the organizations interviewed. “So we would have to turn to expensive outsourcing deals to get the work done.”

The interviews revealed that without UserZoom, researchers could not have completed the quantity or breadth of research their organizations needed. The UserZoom investment led to several key results, including:

• Increasing researcher efficiency by over 80%, reducing the labor required to complete a study from an average of 260 hours in the lab to only 50 hours in UserZoom. This enabled organizations to more than double the number of annual user research studies completed.
• A 68% reduction in participant sourcing costs, saving $287K for the composite organization, as well as a 4x increase in average panel size, yielding more accurate insights.
• Avoiding $350K in costs for benchmarking research, and reducing the cost to conduct international research by $276K, by bringing the research in-house with UserZoom.
• Enabling organizations to run benchmarking studies and integrate user research into short agile sprints.
• Raising the profile of UX teams with more studies, stronger data, and better ways to share results, ultimately helping product teams and executives to understand, value, and invest in user research.