Customer environment and context
What you'll learn
1. Customer behaviors and habits related to the product or service
2. Perspectives from customers interacting with your product or service in their own environment
3. The customer needs that the product is meeting, and discover which are unmet
4. Users’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a product and why
Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall as customers interact with your product? While some moderated and unmoderated tests limit results down to a screen, customer environment and context testing, also known as ethnography studies, opens up opportunities for you to virtually be in customers’ shoes. Easily see, hear, and talk to your customers remotely as they engage with your products, apps, and messaging while recording from their phone’s rear-facing camera.
For instance, you can ask contributors to show you their surroundings such as a living room or inside their vehicle, or show how they typically interact with a product like a thermostat or toaster. Verbal insight you may obtain could include how children or elderly adults impact the way technology is used. Unspoken insight is just as valuable and could showcase how customers store an item in their home or which environmental factors they value. With UserTesting’s mobile recorder, you can even opt for conducting customer experience studies, such as unboxing and destination studies.
This template allows you to uncover relationships between a user’s experience and the real world. You may choose to launch this form of study after a new product launch to study initial reactions, or to guide new product development.
If your organization follows the Design Thinking Process, where an organization looks to understand customers and redefine problems, we recommend evaluating customer environment and context in the early stages—long before design, ideation, prototyping, and testing.
This customer environment and context template offers pre-made questions that you can reuse, build off of, or be inspired by.
1. Have a target environment in mind
Depending on your product, you may choose for your test participants to be filming from their home or at a brick-and-mortar store.
2. Research ahead of time recording rules and regulations
If you’re hoping for your contributor to record themselves in a store, remember that filming isn’t allowed in all places.
3. Factor in personal identifiable information (PII)
While this should be kept in mind with all types of tests, as contributors share their laptop or mobile screens, it’s all the more relevant when a contributor films their personal environment. Screener questions offer a chance to be transparent, from acknowledging the comfort level of a contributor to understanding that not all test participants will opt in.
Hear from our customers
E-learning company Udemy realized they needed more clarity on the patterns and behaviors of students who used Udemy on both mobile and desktop versus those who only used the mobile platform. They found that a long-term study would best fit their needs and with the help of UserTesting, implemented remote, unmoderated diary studies. When a student started a test, they were asked to use their mobile camera to show their environment, context, and what they were doing. After analyzing the results, Udemy noticed that when students were learning, they were typically in one place with some preferring the mobile platform for its convenience. Armed with these findings, Udemy is using these results for new products and feature planning.
Additional resources
Now that you know how to use this template to fit your needs, dive into the resources below to learn how teams across your organization can rely on human insight to create successful, customer-centric products and experiences.
Forrester: UserTesting delivers a 665% ROI over three years
A recent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study, conducted by Forrester on behalf of UserTesting, illustrates how organizations using the UserTesting Human Insight Platform can realize $2.03M in value and 665% in ROI over a three-year period.
