Frequently asked questions

Our usability testing plans all come with an allotment of “credits,” which you can use to order user tests. Our most affordable plan level, the Team Plan, comes with 10 credits per month at a cost of $4,000/yr (roughly $333/mo). Not even including all the robust analytical features and other benefits that come with the plan, that works out to just $33 per test.

That’s a heck of a lot less than recruiting your own panel of users and administering a test in an on-site (or rented) lab yourself. It’s also considerably less than some other user testing sites out there.

Get your first 5 user test results for $0 by signing up for a free trial now!

Credits are used for ordering test results from our user panel. Every Trymata usability testing plan comes with an allotment of credits, and additional ones can be purchased in any quantity.

1 credit is used to order 1 participant for a user test. This is the case regardless of your test setup options or audience selections. To run a test with 10 users, for example, you would need 10 credits.

Credits are only for ordering tests with Trymata’s panel. If you are bringing your own participants, you can test with them using a separate count of external invites.

All of our user testing plans allow you to create and order any number of tests on any number of products and flows. At all plan levels, you are able to collect screen-recorded session videos (with user voice narration), follow-up survey responses, and UX Diagnostics metrics.

Our plans differ primarily in the quantity of panel credits and external test invites allotted, the variety of test setup options and survey models available, maximum video lengths, maximum survey lengths, and number of collaborator logins granted.

See a full comparison of our plan options and features here.

Our plans are available on an annual basis. If you have special testing needs and none of our default plans is well-suited to your requirements, get in touch with one of our team members to talk about custom plan and payment options.

Yes! If you run out of your allotment of credits that came with your plan, or you just need to collect more results than usual, you can always buy additional credits for $25-$35, depending on your plan level.

Credits that come with your user testing plan are available to be used at any time throughout your plan subscription cycle. When your yearly subscription ends, any unused credits are rolled over as long as you renew at the same plan level or higher.

Additionally, individual credits that you purchase ad hoc while on your plan never expire. Until you use them to order a test, they will stay in your account.

We are able to accept payment via credit card, check, or direct deposit. You can purchase a plan subscription directly through our Pricing page here any time. For any other purchase method, or if you need to go through an invoicing and/or purchase order process first, we’ll be happy to help with those steps. Just schedule a call with one of our team members

You get a narrated video of each user navigating your website, app, or prototype, talking about what they like and dislike as they go.

You see their full screen (not just the browser window), plus mouse movements or finger gestures. You hear them say everything they’re seeing, reading, thinking, and doing. In addition, you get their written answers to customizable post-test questions, and a variety of UX metrics.

For most tests, your results will be ready within 3-6 hours. However, the turnaround time is related to the strictness of your demographic filters, so if your requirements are very specific – especially if you have custom criteria or screener questions – it can take us a bit longer to find eligible users. In such cases, it may take up to 24-36 hours for us to completely fulfill your order.

Got more questions about recruiting for your target demographic? Get in touch with one of our team members

You can currently filter the tester pool by gender, age, country of residence, household income bracket, education level, family status, social networks usage, employment type, and more. You can also add your own custom qualification criteria, such as: must be an avid gamer, or must have taken an overseas vacation in the last year.

Trymata’s user pool is comprised of normal people we recruit online. People hear about us through word of mouth and via online blogs, forums, and social media. Geographically, they are located all over the world, with the greatest number of testers in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.

All of our panelists must pass a qualification test demonstrating their ability to vocalize and explain their thoughts before performing paid tests for our customers.

Trymata qualifies candidate users based on their ability to stay on task and to clearly voice everything they see, read, think, or do as they are interacting with your website. That way you get high-quality, insight-dense feedback without the high cost and effort of facilitating the entire user testing process yourself.

We continually re-evaluate our testers using a rating system to ensure that the results we deliver are valuable, meaningful, and actionable.

It's best to just try it for free and see. But if you really want to read about it…

Using the Trymata website, you submit the URL of the product you want to test and present a general scenario and a set of tasks for the testers to follow. For example, the scenario may be: “You’re invited to a very fancy cocktail party and are looking for black shoes to match your dress”. The tasks might include:

1. Talk about how you would go about finding the perfect shoe.
2. Which factors are most important to you in looking for a pair of shoes?
3. Come up with a listing of candidate shoes you’re interested in.
4. Which ones are in your price range? Eliminate any that are not.
5. Make sure the shoes you like are available in your size.
6. Make a final decision about which shoe you are going to buy. What would your next step be?
7. You don’t want to buy them right now - how would you finish the purchase if you close your browser and then come back later?

Finally, you specify your demographic criteria and indicate how many users you would like. Trymata recruits eligible participants from our panel, and presents your scenario and task script to those users as they interact with your product.

Each user taking the test records their session, including their screen, their live audio feedback, and their mouse or gestures. At the end of the recorded portion, they will also fill out any surveys and questionnaires you’ve included. Then, all of the collected test data is returned to you for viewing!

Absolutely! Instead of using our testers, you can test with an unlimited number of your own users on our Enterprise or Unlimited Plans, or with up to 10 of your own users per month (120 per year) on the Team plan.

Ideally, you can benefit from this kind of research at all stages of your product development process. User feedback is valuable before, during, and after any release.

Pre-product testing

• Market validation: Ever wonder how the average customer approaches the market segment or industry you’re in? Suppose you are an online retailer selling digital cameras. Why not perform a general test asking: How would you use the Web to find the best digital camera for you? See how potential customers approach the marketplace. What sites do they visit? What makes them go there? What are they thinking?
• Competitor analysis: Ever wonder what customers think of your competitors’ websites or offerings? Why not use Trymata on your competitors’ websites and find out?
• Conceptualization: You don’t need a live website or even a clickable prototype to benefit from Trymata. You can get immediate user reactions to your static concepts, marketing messages and so on before you even have a working website.

Post-product testing

• Early prototypes: It is never too early to put your prototypes in front of users to help guide your design and priorities. Agile development methods promote acceptance testing by stakeholders including potential customers as a part of each development sprint. Trymata makes it easy to do prototype usability testing and get user feedback in the early stages of development.
• Beta and production: Use Trymata to gauge overall user impressions as well as the performance of all your key user flows after they’ve been built and launched.
• New features: Use Trymata to test each new feature you develop before and after you roll it out.

We recommend testing with a minimum of 5 users to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. With too few users, you may or may not get representative feedback; and while any testing is better than none, it’s best to make sure your results are reliable.

Testing with 15 users will uncover virtually all of the major usability issues, and 20-25 will provide statistically significant quantitative data. However, with just 5 or 6 users, you will probably have already seen several actionable themes to work on.

Read more about usability testing sample size.

It’s true that statistically significant conclusions cannot be derived from a few samples. But with narrated user test videos, you are literally seeing your website through someone else’s eyes. This alone can provide you with several “aha” moments, as you realize that the user’s mental model, interpretation of terminology, and reaction to your website content is quite different than what you imagined.

Sample size is not as critical for qualitative data like this, and the depth of this information illuminates WHY the user is acting as he/she is and provides you with enough insight to decide whether you should correct it or not.

If you do want to collect statistically significant data from a Trymata user test, you can do that too! We don’t put limits on your sample size, and we have a lot of quantitative data types that are well-suited to such studies.

Excellent point! We agree that web logs have a wealth of useful information that can help you understand what features users are exercising, what pages get the most interest, etc. In fact, our product analytics suite provides just this kind of data, with many robust features for filtering and analyzing it.

However, while web logs, or even tools like Google Analytics, answer many questions involving “what” users are doing, they don’t shed much light on “why” they are doing what they are doing. To gain insight on the “why”, you need to ask the user. Our user testing suite is what facilitates this deep interaction with the user.

There’s no doubt that an expert moderator brings a lot to the table. Like a good psychologist, a good moderator can probe the user, understanding his or her motivations without biasing them. In fact, Trymata offers an add-on moderated user testing feature, which allows you to set up and moderate your studies with our software.

Unfortunately, expert moderation is expensive to hire, and difficult to get right if you’re doing it yourself. Trymata unmoderated usability testing provides several advantages:

• It’s extremely simple to set up. You can have the results of your tests within hours of submitting your scenario and tasks, less time than it would take to engage a usability testing agency to set up the first meeting.
• It’s inexpensive. For the price of a single moderated usability study involving 5 users, you can have tests from hundreds of users through Trymata (not that you would necessarily want to).
• It’s very simple to interpret. All you have to do is review the videos of the users executing your scenarios and view their metrics and survey responses.

A number of other companies provide remote usability testing services. In general, the basic data each one provides is more or less the same: self-narrated videos of the tester’s screen as they follow a series of tasks.

What sets us apart is our toolkit designed for making usability research faster and easier. We have developed a variety of features that streamline the user testing process, including: the UX Diagnostics quantitative panel, the UX Crowd for ranking usability problems through crowdsourcing, video annotations for saving key moments, highlight reels for sharing them, and multi-member login for working on research together with your team.

Everything we build is focused on deepening our customers’ understanding of their video data, helping them to analyze better and faster, then synthesize, share, and iterate!

Yes! After creating your test, but before placing the order, visit the main test page and click the “Preview test” link in the top right. This will allow you to walk through the test exactly how your testers will see and experience it. Previewing your test this way does not use up a credit.

The “in progress” status means that a tester has begun work on this test, but the video is not yet ready for viewing. A test result is “in progress” as soon as someone begins recording their video feedback.

After the video and other data have been submitted and uploaded to our server, it will be reviewed by one of our test delivery team members to ensure that the tester followed instructions and has provided useful, high-quality feedback.

When our team decides that the test result meets the Trymata standard, they approve that result and the status changes to “complete,” at which time it will be available for you to view.

If for any reason you find a test result unsatisfactory, please rate it 2 stars or lower. Then, you will automatically be given the option to replace that result at no additional cost.