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How To Conduct A UAT Market Assessment

Did you know that professional UAT teams can add significant value to new releases, even before a single line of code has been written? It’s true. Senior digital leaders are increasingly turning to user acceptance teams with the hope of uncovering critical product insights during the planning stage of the SDLC - not to review their own software, but rather the software of others in your market (and beyond).
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A UAT Market Assessment is just what it sounds like, a traditional user acceptance test, only focused on the assets of other companies instead of your own. And just like traditional UAT, the output will help you understand to what extent companies with challenges similar to your own, are meeting the needs of real-world users.

The output of your review will typically fall into one of two buckets: passes or failures.

Passes & Failures

There are two important things you want to know as a result of a UAT Market Assessment:

  1. Passes - positive functionality or experiences.
  2. Failures - broken functionality or poor experiences.

A “pass” for instance may highlight a particularly effective feature or workflow that you may wish to replicate or reference on your own site. A “failure” on the other hand highlights a poor user experience or buggy feature that should be used as a warning of what to avoid.

UAT Market Assessments are valuable for a variety of reasons.

5 Reasons To Run UAT Market Assessments

Winning A Digital Competitive Edge

Digital transformation and innovation begins with an understanding of the status quo. Less than a decade ago, digital was just a delivery channel. Nowadays, the lines between digital and product are almost non-existent. For example, online loan applications, internet banking, mobile payments and apps are all perfectly valid reasons for customers to choose a particular bank over another. As a digital leader, you have a responsibility to understand what’s happening in your market.

Fast-Track Planning & Design

Planning and design is an understandably tedious stage in the SDLC. UAT Market Assessments allow you to point to concrete examples of what you like and don’t like. At very least, this will help to clarify the scope of work and avoid unnecessary back and forth.

Evolve From Current Best Practices

Newton famously said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. At the risk of giving your competitors undue praise, Newton’s point was that he didn’t start from scratch, and neither should you. Reviewing the software of others is no replacement for your own research, but their (often sizable) investment in research, development and best practices can often give your next project a head start.

Build A Case For Transformation

In some instances, incremental improvements aren’t enough to solve the challenges you’re up against. UAT Market Assessments can also help demonstrate why existing solutions aren’t meeting the needs of users as well as help build a case for starting from a blank slate. Ambitious plans often require ambitious budgets - so any objective evidence you can provide to make your case is extremely valuable.

Avoid Rework & Costly Mis-steps

Occasionally, features and functionality that seem like a good idea, don’t turn out that way in practice. Fortunately UAT Market Assessments allows you to review the shortfalls of other people's’ workflows before you begin working on your own. This helps you overcome sticking points and scrap bad ideas before they derail your project, cost you money and blowout deadlines.

What Does It Look Like In Practice?

UAT Market Assessments can focus on any front-end workflow, on any device, browser or operating system. Since the process is usually deployed with a specific feature in mind, the scope is typically kept quite narrow. For instance, it could focus on specific forms, navigations, applications, media, search functionality, etc..

The output is somewhat similar to a conventional user acceptance test, except the focus of the process is not so much to identify bugs, but rather to highlight how certain features work and why they are effective or ineffective.

Once the UAT Market Assessment process is complete, you’ll have a succinct and critical overview of your competitors’ assets. At Bugwolf, we provide video recordings of key features and workflows along with audio commentary. We’ll also provide a text summary of the video as well as the technical specifications of the OS, browser and devices.

How We Help

If you are thinking about running UAT Market Assessments, we’d love to help. Our process is quick, easy and independent. There are three simple steps:

1. Define Objectives

Discuss what you would like to achieve with your Testing Director. This is where you decide which companies you’d like to review and which features/workflows/devices you’d like us to focus on. Companies may include director competitors, digital teams from different industrys tackling similar problems, or a combination of both.

2. Run The Test Challenge

A team of UAT professionals will begin navigating selected sites. This typically takes six hours in total. They will provide video and audio commentary on functionality, user experience, user interface, and other areas that may be relevant to your objectives.

3. Review The Findings

After the challenge, we will regroup with your team to walk you through key insights. Your team will get full access to all video and audio reports for quick reference as you need them.

Start Your First UAT Market Assessment Today

If you’d like to run your own UAT Market Assessment, we’d be glad to help.

Bugwolf helps you generate market insights that fast-track software planning and design, reduces rework and costly mis-steps and helps build a case for transformation. We do this by providing flexible, on-demand access to professional UAT teams.

Existing Bugwolf clients are invited to conduct their own UAT Market Assessments on demand. To find out more, speak to your Testing Director.

If you are new to Bugwolf and would like to learn more about how to get started, the quickest and easiest way to find out more is to Request A Demo by clicking HERE.

Bugwolf helps digital and delivery teams release software faster with more confidence by unblocking the software testing bottleneck and increasing testing coverage.
Learn More

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