Lenovo + UserTesting

Lenovo is a company well-known for its state-of-the-art digital technology solutions. The company’s Software UX Design team, however, believed that there was room for growth when it came to providing a sophisticated user experience.

The team saw an opportunity to make user experience a key factor in product development. They not only wanted to provide users with an outstanding visual design experience, but also improve software usability and customer satisfaction overall.

Diana Gerli, Software UX Manager, believed that the best way to accomplish this was to promote a customer-centric culture that focused on data collection. “By doing this, we would be able to present our leadership with recommendations focused on increasing customer satisfaction and improving business results, ultimately increasing software revenue for the organization."

With the support of Igor Bergman, Chief Product Officer at Lenovo, the Software UX Design team set out to conduct a study that would allow them to collect the user data they needed to create a more seamless user experience.

Although Lenovo’s Software UX team conducted some usability testing, they lacked the insights they needed to improve the user experience. Due to limited time and funding, the team would often rely on insights they gathered from surveying internal employees.

The issue was, however, that these results were often biased, which did little to provide the company’s Software UX Design team clarity about where they should invest their efforts. Diana also had to change the way the Software UX Design team worked.

“Designers were uncomfortable with testing ‘unfinished’ work and little-to-no testing was conducted on wireframes, information architecture, or low-fidelity mockups. In order to be taken seriously by leadership, I knew this had to change.”

Lenovo’s Software UX Design team set out to find the best solution to enable them to conduct more frequent and sophisticated user testing. That's when they found UserTesting.

Lenovo’s eCommerce UX team acquired a UserTesting subscription and partnered with the Software UX Design team so they could explore and test drive this remarkable human insight platform.

“It was an amazing experience that seemed to be the answer to what I was looking for,” says Diana.

Lenovo’s Software UX Design team ran a pilot study to help them establish where Lenovo Vantage, the company’s lead software application, landed on a system usability scale. This task quickly revealed that Lenovo Vantage’s usability ranked low among customers and why, which was eye-opening for leadership. Insights from UserTesting helped leadership to easily see the opportunities for Lenovo’s Software UX Team to close experience gaps with improved usability. This led to product owners and development teams partnering with the Software UX team to address a broad spectrum of customer pain points to improve both customer and business impact simultaneously.

Since that initial pilot test, Lenovo’s Software UX Team has fully adopted UserTesting and now uses it to test all of their major software projects. Thanks to UserTesting, the Software UX Team is able to connect with a diverse group of customers, allowing Lenovo to think globally and ensure that new offerings resonate well with customers around the world and across business sectors.

The company’s Software UX Team has significantly scaled testing since adopting the solution as part of their design process. In fact, the company counted 2,093 customer interactions in the last fiscal year alone and is looking to top that number by the end of the current fiscal year. Additionally, UserTesting allows Lenovo’s Software UX Team to make strategic decisions about how to allocate their time and resources. For example, Diana notes that the company can now identify projects that don’t meet a SUS score of 80 early on in the planning process and put a stop to them.

More importantly, UserTesting has led to a shift in Lenovo’s culture toward a more customer-centric approach. The company can now test designs at every stage of development to identify problems and gather information for product ideation, prototyping, design specs, and validation. “UserTesting allows the UX team to be involved in the development of software projects early on, allowing us to create an intuitive user experience that improves customer satisfaction and drives business growth,” says Diana.