UserTesting's accessibility advancements ensure powerful insights from all

UserTesting’s platform connects companies with insightful human feedback

UserTesting has fundamentally changed the way organizations get insights from customers with fast opt-in feedback and experience capture technology. The UserTesting Human Insight Platform, taps into our global network of real people and generates video-based Customer Experience Narratives (CXNs)™, so anyone in an organization can directly ask questions, hear what users say, see what they mean, and understand what it’s actually like to be a customer. Unlike approaches that track user behavior and then try to infer what that behavior means, UserTesting eliminates the guesswork and brings customer experience data to life with human insight. UserTesting had more than 2,100 customers, including more than half of the world’s top 100 most valuable brands according to Forbes.

Having an accessible platform is essential to UserTesting’s mission: to provide valuable insights from humans on how they experience companies’ products and services. In order to ensure that the users of their platform can provide the best feedback possible and that their customers can receive the best insights, UserTesting sought the help of an accessibility vendor to evaluate the current state of their platform for accessibility.

Audit drives accessibility improvements to critical user flows

The initial audit from Deque consisted of over 35 screens, critical flows and pages on UserTesting’s web and mobile platform. By way of the audit, the UserTesting team made improvements to critical paths on their platform, such as onboarding and sign-up flows.

The UserTesting team utilized axe DevTools Pro to validate their work after implementing accessibility fixes. “Axe DevTools has been instrumental in understanding the issues and improving our testing processes” reflects Natalie Russell, Accessibility Program Manager at UserTesting. “The fact that we can automate and semi-automate up to 84% of our issues with Pro is immensely helpful with triaging the issues found in the audits, and it makes it very clear what is a best practice versus what’s actually a violation.” The UserTesting team also credits axe Auditor, Deque’s manual testing tool, for being helpful in providing screenshots and step-by-step instructions on how to fix issues, including references to specific WCAG rules in violation.

A skip-nav button within UserTesting’s UI, helping users to more efficiently navigate the page. 

UserTesting’s Customer Dashboard, from where customers can manage their Tests. 

Deque audit helps fuel investment in future accessibility practice

The audit project with Deque has also impacted how UserTesting now approaches product design and development work. Specifically, UserTesting’s focus on auditing component libraries and templates ensures that when elements are reused, they have already been audited for accessibility. “That’s where a lot of improvements have been made,” says Natalie Russell. “The next time we have a new project or the next time someone picks up that component, it’s already been made accessible so we’re not reimplementing something with accessibility defects.”

UserTesting has been sharing learnings about building for accessibility across their organization. “The real-life examples and fixes that we’ve been doing helped bring some of the concepts home a lot more,” reflects Natalie. “The training itself was a huge success… it really spurred everyone on with the audit remediation because we have a deeper understanding of the impact.”

Accessibility supports both customer and business goals

At UserTesting, accessibility work pays dividends to their customers and business. The ongoing commitment to the accessibility of their platform ensures that their customers and users are able to obtain accurate and important insights from their feedback tools that will help them, in turn, create more powerful and impactful products and services. 

Completing a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) with Deque also helped reassure customers about their own accessibility goals and engage in productive conversations about accessibility compliance. “Accessibility is not just the right thing to do, but it also makes financial sense, too, from a business perspective,” notes Lija Hogan, Customer Experience Consultant at UserTesting.

The UserTesting Contributor view, which displays available tests for users to take and provide feedback.