Segmentation is a crucial strategy in user testing that enhances your product insights. By dividing your tester pool into subsets based on specific characteristics, you ensure comprehensive representation of your target market and efficiently manage feedback. This approach helps identify patterns in your product's performance and testers' experiences, enabling your team to implement impactful changes.
In this blog post, we'll explore segmentation and provide concrete examples of how to effectively segment your tester pool during user tests.
Types of Audience Segmentation
There are several ways to segment your audience, but here are the three primary categories:
- Demographic Segments
- Technographic Segments
- Psychographic Segments
Demographic Segmentation
Demographic segmentation involves grouping testers based on characteristics such as age, gender, or education. This is crucial during user testing as it reveals how different audiences use and perceive your product. For instance, segmenting smart speaker users by age helps monitor the ease of use for older demographics.
Examples of Demographics
- Age
- Income
- Education
- Gender
- Geographic location
- Type of home
Technographic Segmentation
Understanding your product's interaction with other technologies is essential. Technographic segments focus on how your product interacts with other devices and systems in real-world scenarios.
For example, if you're testing a smart lock and know that customers who purchase it often own your company's smart security solution, segmenting testers by those who already own the security system can provide valuable insights for your engineering, product, and marketing teams.
Examples of Technographics
- Mobile phone model and operating system
- Television model
- Modems and routers
- Internet speed
- Smart devices owned
Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segments categorize testers based on preferences, habits, feelings, and attitudes. While technographic segments offer insights into interoperability, psychographic segments provide context for user experiences and satisfaction.
For instance, segmenting smartwatch users by exercise habits can reveal differences in perceived usefulness between those who run regularly and those who don't exercise at all.
Examples of Psychographics
- Level of technical aptitude
- Prefers solo exercise to group exercise
- Watches 4 or more hours of television a day
Segmentation in Tester Recruitment
Recruiting a tester pool that mirrors your marketing segments ensures user testing outcomes accurately reflect your target audience. A sufficient number of testers in each segment is necessary to surface issues and establish statistical significance.
Consider a mobile-only streaming service for gamers, where the target audience is predominantly male and regularly plays video games. To reflect this in your tester pool, ensure candidates meet core requirements, such as playing video games and owning a smartphone. Then, segment the pool to match your audience: a 60/40 gender split and a 50/50 split between Android and iPhone users. Additionally, segment by gaming frequency to monitor satisfaction levels: 25% game 1-2 days a week, 50% game 3-4 days a week, and 25% game 5 days or more.
Segmentation in Feedback Analysis
Segmentation proves invaluable during feedback analysis, allowing you to quickly identify patterns and direct insights to the appropriate teams.
For example, if Android testers encounter a bug specific to their OS, their feedback and crash reports can be sent directly to the Android app engineers. Similarly, if users in cold climates praise your smart thermostat, your marketing and sales teams would benefit from this information.
Let's Get Those Insights
Now that you understand the power of segmentation in user testing, you're likely eager to apply it. However, finding testers in your target market can be overwhelming without proper guidance.
That's why we've created the Recruitment Kit, designed to simplify the user testing recruitment process. Whether you're beta testing, field testing, or conducting other types of tests, our step-by-step guide, worksheets, and templates will help you identify top test candidates for your next project. Get your free Recruitment Kit in our testing resource library.
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