537% ROI – Forrester reveals the economic impact of investing in UserZoom

This is according to a Forrester Consulting report, The Total Economic Impact™ Of UserZoom, which investigates the cost savings and business benefits of working with UserZoom.

Other key benefits discovered by Forrester include:

• Cost savings – Running lab studies, benchmarking and international research with UserZoom can save your company $1.9m

• Reduced labor – Conducting studies with UserZoom instead of in-lab can lead to an 80% reduction in labor, allowing companies to run more than double the amount of studies

• Participant sourcing – The cost of finding study participants can be up to 68% less with UserZoom, while UserZoom panels contain 4x more participants

Let’s delve a little deeper into the report…

Why commission a TEI study?

We wanted to provide our current and potential customers with a framework to evaluate how we financially impact organisations through our comprehensive UX Research solutions.

We also wanted the report to be conducted independently and objectively by a third-party, namely Forrester Consulting, who maintained editorial control over the study. UserZoom provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Forrester interviewed four UserZoom customers to better understand the benefits, costs and risks associated with this investment.

Why did these customers turn to UserZoom?

The four customers interviewed all recognized the importance of user research, but all faced substantial challenges in launching meaningful studies, from the lack of quantity to the lack of scope, while taking in typical constraints such as budget, time, resources and tools.

According to Forrester, the interviewees turned to UserZoom’s user testing platform to substantially improve researcher productivity, while gaining the ability to run quantitative studies, perform mixed method research, integrate research into short agile sprints, and reach more representative user segments. UserZoom therefore enabled not just more research, but better research — with the goal of better UX.

Quantifying ‘better UX’

Based on the interviews with our existing customers and financial analysis, Forrester found that an organization can experience benefits of $2,253,297 over three years versus costs of $353,856, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $1,899,441 and an ROI of 537%.

Forrester’s interviews also revealed the following risk-adjusted present value (PV) benefits:

UserZoom more than doubled the quantity of UX studies – UserZoom provided an alternative to lab studies and enabled organizations to run international and benchmarking studies without major third-party costs and labor, which helped avoid almost $2 million in costs

UserZoom increased researcher productivity by 80% – By diverting 117 lab studies to UserZoom, organisations avoided $1.3M in excess labor. Lab studies typically required 260 hours of labor while UserZoom studies required only 50 hours.

UserZoom helped save $276K in expense for conducting international research – Organisations replaced in-person remote research with online studies via UserZoom, helping them to avoid extensive coordination, travel costs and time zone challenges.

Qualifying ‘better UX’

Other benefits revealed by the interviewees, include the following unquantifiable positive results:

• Gained the capability to incorporate user research into the agile development process for the first time
• Improved audience segmentation, broadened scope and strengthened the statistical significance and confidence of research
• Demonstrated the value of user research to product teams and executives, helping to encourage adoption and additional investment
• Democratized user research by enabling designers and product managers to conduct their own studies

As one of the interviewees, UX research leader for Cisco, states: “Having all of the research capabilities within UserZoom and having the UserZoom self-service feature is of big value for our team.