Wise + UserTesting

Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) is a publicly-traded, London-based technology company founded in 2011. Wise is building the best way to move and manage money around the world, helping a community of over 10 million like-minded people and businesses.

Wise hired Jennifer Lee as their first qualitative researcher to understand how they could improve their app and their website based on customer insights. This was something of an experiment for the organization, which deeply cared about customer feedback from day one but traditionally had a stronger focus on engineering and analytics.

Jennifer recognized UserTesting would help her scale the organization's research function. She explains, “To achieve this, I needed to convince the company that qualitative research is valid, necessary, and important. This would not have been possible without UserTesting. I used it as a hook, with the promise of simple and fast access to research insights. Speed proved to be the consistent selling point for my colleagues. Getting insights back in under two hours was a game-changer for them. Once I had them convinced regarding the speed at which they could work, I got them on their way with the basics of interview moderation and unbiased question writing.”

Jennifer then held monthly UX Research 101 classes that anyone in the company could join to learn about qualitative research. This began the democratization of the research function, as requests to get involved came from their HR/People Team, Engineering, Project Management, Marketing, Design, and more. Anyone can request access—including the company’s new hires.

Wise’s volume of qualitative research surged. The Research team is now 12 people and growing. That growth parallels the expansion from 600 employees to 2,800 during the same period. As teams now understand they can get the data and the human insight they need to better run their projects, Wise conducts up to 30 remote tests with UserTesting every week and 5 to 10 live studies each month. The heaviest users are Product Managers, Designers, and employees in the Brand and Marketing teams. 

This testing has impacted all of Wise’s platforms, including website and mobile, APIs, and the company’s apps on Android and the App Store. And customers have a more pleasant experience reaching those platforms, as evidenced, in one example, by a 400% increase in online page views, based on testing conducted by the Marketing team. 

According to Nilan Peiris, Wise’s VP of Growth, “There's a bit of magic that starts to happen after teams spend time one-on-one, or one with many, with a group of customers. They start to develop an empathy for the end user and intuition around the problems they have and how we could solve that really well.” 

Wise has developed deeper empathy with their end customers—and their intuition regarding what they should build next—which helps the organization continue to grow.