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- [00:02]
A
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, I'm joined by my colleague Mike McDowell, a principal solutions marketing manager at UserTesting. And if you know Mike, you know this is going to be a high energy deep dive. We're talking all about what's ahead for 2026. From our Figma plugin to AI driven test creation to smarter research workflows and even diary study upgrades, there's a lot to get excited about. Enjoy the show.
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B
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
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A
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content marketing manager at UserTesting and our guest today is Mike McDowell, our principal solutions Marketing manager. Welcome, Mike.
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C
Thanks, Nathan. It's always awesome to be here on the podcast.
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A
I know you're like the co host of the podcast, but besides being a podcast host, can you tell listeners what you do at User Testing?
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C
Sure. Here at User Testing, I basically support our product team by helping evangelize the products, figure out the best ways to have our teams communicate the value of the solutions that we're rolling out to the marketplace. I get to do talks from time to time at various conferences. Last night we hosted this great Dubai chocolate making experience. I got to host that while helping people figure out how to plan for 2026, how to get started, and occasionally I go on site with account teams to help share some innovative ways that you could use user testing that maybe our customers haven't thought of. So lot of fun stuff on a day to day basis. You never know what it might be. And of course I do make video content as well, which I think a lot of people know me for.
- [01:58]
A
Yeah, I was just going to mention that either you, you, you See Mike on YouTube on the mic drop videos or you'll see him on LinkedIn with his videos there and just very active on both places and also just in a very value ad sort of way. So I want to. Yeah, you're not, you're not disgusting with, you know, the, the selling that some of these folks, these quote unquote influencers are trying to do. Most of the time it's all value add.
- [02:30]
C
Yeah, I mean the beauty of it is, you know, I've been a customer of User Testing before and I've, I know what it's like to not have customer insights and most people in corporate headquarters are in a complete black hole. They have no idea what their customers think. And so I just try to create content that I think answers questions for people or helps them figure how to get their own answers. And I just assume they already have user testing for the most part, and I'm just trying to help them get more from it. So, and you know, if you don't have it and you decide you want to check it out, that's cool too.
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A
Well, and I think sometimes you just bring in a framework that they can bring. Even if they don't have user testing, they can think about what tools they do have and, and use your framework there as well. Right?
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C
Yeah, I mean 100%. I mean the whole, the name of the game is just, yeah, know, getting feedback from your customers, whatever means possible. If it means that, you know, I used to work at Rekt before I worked at User Testing. And yes, I would stand in the cleaner aisle and watch people pick their disinfectant. And if they picked one, I would go, hey, I'm sorry, my advantage asked, why did you pick that one over that one? I'm weird, I can't turn it off. But you know, it's, it's just getting those answers by any means necessary and oftentimes it's very easy to do it. You know, you just have to be committed to, to going out and getting answers. With user testing, of course, we make it a lot easier. You don't have to go anywhere, you can just do it from your desk. It's great.
- [03:52]
A
Yeah, dial in who you want to talk to, all that sort of fun stuff. Speaking of the product, what are you excited about as you look into 2026? What are the things that excite you most? All the hacks you're, you're thinking about in your head, all the, that type of thing.
- [04:11]
C
I, I, I know people know that. I work at User testing, right. So they're going to be like, oh, I was just saying that. But I honestly do believe that 2026 is going to be our most exciting year yet. Very specifically, we've started doing a lot of cool stuff with AI, but it's only going to get better in 2026. So something that you're going to see is AI test creation. The idea that you can just type in what you want to learn and it will give you a test plan for that that's coming in 2026 to the general platform today. Nathan, today, I don't know if you know this yet, I might be telling you this for the first time. Our very first customer started using the figma Plugin Beta, which has AI test creation built into it, and our very first AI test from a customer was launched today. So I'm very excited about that and what we're going to see from that in the platform in 2026, you're also going to see more AI analysis, AI report generation. So full true reports today you can do with insights, discovery and sort of pull it over into a report, but you're going to start seeing proper report generation with insights and everything and videos. It's going to be great. That's another thing with AI, you're going to start seeing AI, perhaps AI moderation, AI participants. Right. We are not replacing human feedback in user testing, but when it comes to things like automated feedback and AI participants, you know, they're really great for validating things right up front. Like, is this adhering to design best practices, little things like, I mean, Fitz Law always stands out to me as one of these UX rules, font colors, contrast, accessibility rules. There are ways that AI can validate those for you ahead of your actual human feedback. So we're going to see some of that coming from an AI standpoint, always just trying to make it easier to get insights for people who maybe aren't researchers and for people who are researchers, helping them to aggregate large amounts of data quickly and then they can still do the work and refine what they want to do on it. On top of that, you're going to probably see a redesign look and feel of the platform. You know, we've been moving there for the last like 12 to 18 months. We're going to start seeing more of that. I just mentioned it before. Figma integration. The figma integration, when I mean, I was fortunate enough, I got to pitch that on stage at Config back in May, and that was a real career highlight. I mean, so many people were so excited and now that we, people were actually asking at the time, like, are you guys really gonna be able to make this? Is this really, is this vaporware or is this real? And as I said, it's beta right now. Customers have started using it. I can't say what customer, obviously, but they're big. They're big. And I've been doing a lot of demos of it. I'm gonna record another demo of it today. But it is a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous thing for people have no research experience to be able to just inside of figma, pop open a widget, a plugin, and then just type in some stuff and it runs the test and gives them results without ever Leaving figma. So that's a tremendous thing that I'm looking forward to us rolling that out to more customers. And then one of the other things that is a big, big thing that we're working on is diary study enhancements. I always tell people that yes, you can run diary studies today and user testing it is super easy. I've done videos on it. But a lot of people want it to be a little bit more packaged. And so user testing is listen. We listen to our customers, right? I mean, of course, of all things for us to do listen to our customers is at the top of the. And so we are building a new packaged version of diary studies which also lends itself to other longitudinal type studies, benchmarking studies and bringing that all together in one simple package that's easy to manage, easy to communicate with your participants, keep them on track and so on. A lot of AI is going to be built into that. There's some other things that we're noodling with. I can't share them unfortunately, but there are some really cool features that our product team has shared with me and I've even proposed to our product team that we might be able to include in the platform in 2026. Speaking of back to Figma integrations, API development, API level integrations and accessibility to the platform, we are going to make the results of studies accessible via API so teams can start bringing results. Just like we have it in figma, just like we have it in jira, Confluence or any other platform. Miro that you can just bring insights in, you're going to start being able to bring those user testing insights into other platforms. So there's just so much going on. I'm trying to think of other things. I know a lot of people skim provisioning, things like that. I mean that to me that's not super exciting. I know for people in the security world that's like, they're like, oh my gosh, yeah, they're so excited. I'm really excited about getting to actual insights faster and the enhanced use of AI. Probably, you know, people get concerned, they say, oh, you know, I'm not a researcher, I'll never be able to do this. And from the very beginning, user testing has always been been trying to be a great platform for those people. When I was a customer I was a product manager, so I was not a researcher. I mean, I'd sat behind a lot of two way mirrors in my day, but I was not a researcher by any stretch of the imagination and I could use it but since then it's only gotten better with templates. And then we went to quick answer templates and now we've got marketing solution campaign templates and stuff in there and we've got insight kits that are in there for people to use. So no matter what your role, you can filter things. We're always trying to get better for the non researcher and 2026 is just going to enhance that. Enhance the Democrat. People don't like the word democratization, but the shareability of insights, the pervasiveness of customer insights. It used to be that I would say. Well, I still say it, but if you are doing a presentation on a deck at work and you don't have a video of a customer in there from user testing, you just, you're selling yourself short. Because that is the best way to create empathy for your customers is to show somebody what your customer experience is from the eyes of a customer. And now we're taking that just to the next level with the ability to pull all the insights into other tools. Um, yeah, I mean I'm, I'm going to be busy making videos in 2026. I know that because there's just so much coming and fortunately, I mean, I get it. I get advanced looks at a lot of these things, you know, in my role and it's just so, so exciting. And I'm not just saying that because I work here, I promise.
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A
Yeah, no, I, I mean there's so much there. Going back to the AI, one of the things we had John Whan on the podcast earlier this fall and he just loved the idea of using AI even in that, in the test creation stage. And just saying, are the questions I'm asking, do they make sense? Right. And I don't know if you've run a test. I've run a test where everybody did exactly what I asked him to do. Unfortunately, I asked them to do the wrong thing. Right.
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C
Yeah.
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A
I'm not a man and I did one of those, you know, hands to your head going, oh geez, I should have asked this. Right. You know, something else. And that's just that saved me. I mean I got everything back in within a day, so I didn't lose a lot of time. But it's still, it was some wasted effort there.
- [11:20]
C
Well, and that it's that end AI for the screeners, for our audiences. Right. Because even if the test is right, if we've, if we're asking the wrong people or you know, we're, or people, we're letting the wrong people into our Studies. Right. It's all controlled by your screener questions and who you invite. And today user testing has AI screener guidance where it'll tell you, hey, you might want to revise this or add a few more answers so it's not so obviously guessable. So things like that are already. We're seeing tremendous improvements and there's AI fraud detection in the platform as well that will validate the videos and look at them before they make it back into the platform. Yes, user testing still has its rating systems and all these things for you to manually rate the participants, but you know, the product team has just been trying to make sure that it doesn't even have to come to that. Like, we're going to try to get the most egregious things out before it ever gets to you. We'll replace it automatically. Like you said, things are filled very quickly. I mentioned the chocolate hosting event last night, the chocolate making event. I ran four studies yesterday, two qualitative and two quantitative studies, and they were all chocolate themed and they were all done well in advance of my event, F430. So that I always like to put my money where my mouth is with user testing and I will run always if I can, the studies the same day as the presentation to show just how fast everything can be run in the platform. And even last night I launched a study in our figma in our figma plugin. And that same thing came back in less than two hours with I think it was 10 participants giving full feedback on my prototype that I was working on. So the speed, and we're only trying to get faster. I mean, that's the crazy thing is, you know, we're still trying to get faster, trying to speed that up. There's been a lot of innovations this year. These are things that customers don't see, but they're sort of under the covers innovations where, oh, the way that we distribute the invitations, take the tests and who they go to, that stuff's been getting massaged behind the scenes. And so these improvements are happening. Most people just sort of like, it's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror after like a year, you're like, wait a minute, wow, I look so different. But if you're looking every day, you don't notice anything changing. But. But there's a lot of things happening under the covers of user testing to make it even better than it already is.
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A
You know, I just had to kind of give you the finger there. I think we need to figure out how to Tap into all of your energy because you're just, it's just so much, so much the. I do.
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C
You.
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A
You had mentioned democratization. And really, I think, I think of it in terms of like giving people agency. Right. I talked to. We have, you know, new employees come in, you know, join in user testing every now and then throughout the year, and they're like, oh, can you walk me through this test? I'm like, I can do that, but I want you to just try and do it yourself because I think you'll find out how easy it is and you're not going to screw anything up.
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C
Exactly.
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And they do that and then like, wow. And they're just blown away just how easy it really is to, you know, get a question answered by anyone just about anywhere in the world. And then I, you, you mentioned it and that just the, the investment we've made, even this last year on just making sure that the people who are our contributors are really the people that you want, you know, you as an organization want to talk to. And they're not just all, you know, whatever they may be, we're making sure that they're real people. So anyway, your thoughts on one of those things or both?
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C
Well, yeah, just, I mean, in terms of panel, I mean, we're one of the few companies that actually has an audience solutions team that is constantly working on all of this. They are looking at every angle of who we're letting in. What's the vetting process? I always say that our participants have to audition to be in our network. And so all of that they're working on, they're working on the panel partnerships. Hey, qualitative versus quantitative studies. What's the best way to get people comfortable giving feedback in a study versus filling out a survey? All these things. There are literally teams of people working on it and, you know, flipping it something else. That is probably one of the things that people should focus on more is understanding the value. We have a value management office, all that stuff. But let's head back to the democratization thing. Let's go back to that. Let's just take an easy one. The idea that it used to just be. You could share your video clips that used to be where it was, where it started, share your video clips. Or you could download a PDF or your Excel file. Now it's truly embedding a video clip right onto a figjam board so that everyone is doing a new design. What the design team, they can answer that question themselves. But why are we doing this thing? What is the reason that we're doing this, because a lot of times you get pushback internally, right? People know that you want to do something, People say, no, it works fine. Everyone understands that, especially if you're a designer, right? No offense, designers, but sometimes we are very confident in our designs if no one's ever used them. And then when we watch someone use them, we want to pull our hair out because they can't see the obvious thing on the screen. And so now you can see that, right? In a figjam board, when someone reports a JIRA ticket about something in the website, there's a video clip of someone having the bug happen to them as opposed to all this back and forth. So democratizing research doesn't just mean people coming into the platform, it means putting that research in all the places around the company to assist with what's going on. But for those people that do want to come into user testing, even if they're not a creator, they don't want to create tests, they just want to find an answer to a question. So all you have to do with that is. I mentioned insights discovery before. You can literally just type in, what do people think about my website? Has anyone ever mentioned login? And if anyone has ever done research on that area, even if it wasn't the focus of that research, it might have just been some innocuous comment that came up. User testing's AI will find it and will surface it to you to tell you what's been done. That way you don't have to waste time redoing research or commissioning a new study if it's already been found. So it's saving. It's not only making things more efficient, but it's saving companies time and for keeping them from wasting resources by making it accessible to all. So, yeah, back, back when I used it, I was kind of like the gatekeeper. I owned the whole thing. And now anyone could just come in and just ask it questions and learn what they want to learn. And only if it. If we don't have an answer, then you can ask your researcher or whoever it might be, hey, can you get some answers on this? We need, we need to know this. And we need to know it by 3 o', clock, by the way. And you can still do it.
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A
Yeah, yeah, before I let you go, Yeah, I just. My thoughts on as, like, it's also a way to kind of prevent the hippo in the room from taking over the conversation, you know, oh, they all know exactly what, what, who, you know, what we should say in a messaging or, you know, who should we talk to? And all this kind of stuff. Well, and you can just say, did we test that? Here's the actual footage of people saying, responding to that point you just made.
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C
Exactly. Well, you know, to that exit, to that exact point. I won't say what company this was, but yesterday as part of our chocolate event, we. We saw that one of the major chocolate manufacturers was launching a Dubai chocolate product. They just announced it in December, just not that long ago. And when I ran a prioritization study using the new rank order question that we have, I had Dubai chocolate experience in a list of 12 things, it was rated the 10th out of the 12th most important thing that that company could be doing so by, by true chocolate lovers. So, you know, maybe that wasn't the right thing to push. And yes, it's trendy. It's trendy. But is are their customers the people who are, you know, pushing the trend forward? So a lot of interesting things. And yeah, either Hippo or Son of Hippo, I find can be also very pushy getting their ideas, getting their ideas done. Anyway.
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A
Well, and that's just a great call to action for folks to learn about all your Zootopia references. You can go back on your LinkedIn and you'll see what Mike was talking about there, whether it's Hippo or Son of Hippo. And Hippo.
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C
Rhino, Zebra.
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Exactly, yeah.
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C
Seagull. There's a lot of them out there.
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A
Mike, I really, really appreciate you being on the show today and I enjoyed our conversation. How does somebody learn more about any of the topics that we were talking about?
- [19:41]
C
I mean, definitely, if you're a user testing customer, reach out to your CSMs and ask those people. Or you can reach out to me directly. I'm@mmcdowellusertesting.com or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there, generally speaking. Accept most requests that are sent to me and I'd love to have a chat. And if you want a private meeting or conversation to talk through something, I'm happy to do it. Nothing gives me more pleasure really professionally than really getting some facetime with the customer and trying to help them get more from their own customers through better insights. So that's how you could find me anytime. Or just look for me here on maybe an upcoming version of this podcast. You never know.
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A
You never know. All right, Mike, I'll talk with you soon. Thank you so much.
- [20:23]
C
Thanks, Nathan. Goodbye, everybody.
- [20:25]
B
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes at user if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.