Understanding How People Feel About a Company or Product

There are many times when you might want to understand what current feelings people have about your company or product. Gaining such an understanding is useful when you are…

• Planning or updating a new product or service
• Conducting a competitive analysis to understand how people feel about a competitor or brand leaders in other categories.
• Crafting a marketing campaign, and you want to communicate the correct tone based on how people currently regard your company.
• Wanting to hear the voice of your customer (often a general focus of a company executive).

To collect this feedback:

• Determine if you want to hear from current customers, people who are not customers, and/or another group. Once you define the characteristics that describe the people you are looking for, you will create screener questions based on those characteristics. Tip: Once you define an audience you want to talk with across different company projects, add them to a list of favorite contributors.
• We typically recommend 3–5 contributors per group when  design or product
• Determine whether you want to talk to people live, in a one-on-one discussion, or have them answer questions on their own.
• If you want to talk to people live one-on-one, set up a Live Conversation in the UserTesting Platform. You will enter the characteristics of the people you want to talk to and define your schedule. The Platform will find the individuals who meet your criteria and schedule the sessions. This course on running effective Live Conversations contains some example interview scripts if you need some inspiration.
• If you want people to answer questions on their own (so that multiple people can respond at the same time and you get your results faster), set up an unmoderated test in the Platform.
• Have contributors react to a creative asset (e.g., a video, logo, or text passage/message). Then ask follow-up questions that help you understand words and emotions people associate with the brand.

Once your sessions are complete, you can review the results in the Platform, where you can then take notes, share clips with colleagues, and create highlight reels.

Helpful tips:

• If you are new to the UserTesting Platform, take the UserTesting University’s Jumpstart courses to help you become familiar with how to run a test.
• If you need inspiration on what questions to ask, see the Platform’s Template Gallery.
• If you want to talk with people outside the UserTesting Contributor Network—customers identified by your sales team, for example—use the Invite Network feature to build your audiences.