In Plain Sight: Usersnap’s Visual Feedback Solution Makes it Easier for Businesses to Learn from Their Customers

TL; DR: Usersnap’s visual platform empowers businesses in more than 100 countries to organize customer feedback and collect bug reports. The solution allows them to integrate user acceptance testing (UAT) into their web development projects, thus identifying pain points that drive product decisions. The ultimate goal is to help foster business environments where feedback is meaningful and actionable.

Most business leaders agree that feedback is essential for improving products, services, and the overall customer experience. But effective communication is difficult — especially when it comes to digital products.

While technology has made communication more accessible, it’s not necessarily more effective. Tone and emotion get lost in text messages. Exclamation points and capital letters are misconstrued in emails. And direct relationships between vendors and customers feel increasingly distant.

Enter Usersnap, a visual communication tool that helps customers, developers, and teams clearly convey their thoughts and ideas when working on web projects.

Today, the company continues to empower brands to listen to their customers and gain invaluable insights that can be used to make customer-centric business decisions.

“Usersnap has way more functionalities and use cases now — beta testing, collecting feature requests, a net promoter score (NPS) tool — but our core value remains unchanged: ensuring the ease of sharing meaningful feedback,” Josef said.

Today, Usersnap empowers businesses in over 100 countries to perform quality assurance (QA), testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and visual bug tracking. The platform enables these companies to transform feedback into lessons learned — and make those lessons accessible to all employees.

Ultimately, Usersnap aims to help foster business environments where feedback helps uncover pain points and drive meaningful product improvements.

Usersnap’s story began in 2012, when Josef had the idea to make web development more efficient via a visual communication tool.

“My co-founders and I are all software engineers, and we experienced the pain of client communication firsthand,” Josef said.

The company, based in Austria, was officially founded in 2013 after raising funding through SpeedInvest. “I would call 2013 the somewhat early days of SaaS hitting the mainstream,” Josef said. “The market was fully focused on the cloud, and SaaS tools reached more audiences and inspired new needs. Also, companies were beginning to employ and invest in smaller, niche SaaS tools that helped improve the development lifecycle.”

The time was right to create a widget that would help development teams working on websites and apps point out issues via screenshots and annotations — and the earliest version of Usersnap was born.

“In the beginning, our target group was small web and software agencies who were using Usersnap mainly to support UAT and client acceptance testing,” Josef said. “As the product evolved, our customer base expanded to include everything from small to medium e-commerce, e-learning, and SaaS platforms to software enterprises like Microsoft, Canva, and Dynatrace. And, of course, we still love agencies.”

Ultimately, however, anyone who works on digital products can leverage Usersnap to collect and react to customer feedback.

“We believe feedback-driven companies provide the best products to people,” Josef said. “We put customers and their stories first: we listen, learn, improve, evaluate and we enable our customers to do the same. By putting ‘listen’ first, we are promoting the voice of customers.”

Josef told us that, in the years since Usersnap’s inception, the company’s product development team has witnessed the evolution of customer expectations when it comes to the user interface and overall user experience.

“As customers and end-users become more familiar and advanced in utilizing visual feedback and bug-tracking tools, they have higher expectations of UX and flexibility,” he said. “Over the years, we revamped our widget design and project dashboard many times, as well as our onboarding screens, in order to keep the UI and UX clean and intuitive while delivering more features.”

Users appreciate the simplicity of the product, which requires no training. Josef told us that one customer put it bluntly: “Usersnap makes it easier for dumb, unmotivated users to provide feedback and articulate their questions with foolproof visual guidance.”

Anyone who has ever dealt with clients on a digital project can surely relate.

The Usersnap development team has also added more than 30 native integrations to the platform to streamline workflows and increase flexibility. These include well-known third-party software products, such as Jira, Slack, Trello, and WordPress.

“Customers have told us this is one of our key competitive advantages,” Josef said.

In addition to making it easier for users to communicate with their clients via software tools, Usersnap is focused on sharing best practices on how to best serve those clients from a broader perspective.

“Companies have always said to put customers first, but in recent years the research and methodologies that tech companies use to form a customer-centric culture have grown exponentially,” Josef told us. “Therefore, in addition to making sure our tool allows companies to gather customer feedback accurately and timely, we try to share knowledge and resources on how to create a customer-centric process as well.”

In May, the company held its first virtual summit, The Journey To Customer-Centric Growth, which featured more than 50 leaders and industry experts who have unlocked growth by genuinely listening to their customers.

It’s easy to get started with Usersnap’s powerful widget, which features fast installation using HTML or CMS plugins, multiple language options, and support for both desktop and mobile devices.

“To help busy project managers keep track of feedback on the go, we launched the mobile app on both Apple Store and Google Play in May,” Josef said.

The platform is also enterprise-ready, with white-labeling, custom service level agreements and payment options, and full API access. Advanced features include browser extensions for feedback on any webpage, and guest access permissions.

Users can easily create detailed bug reports directly from the browser using screenshots with annotations and comments, client-side JavaScript logs, and relevant metadata.

Earlier this year, the Usersnap team released its Routing Menu Widget, which displays a selection of feedback projects on a single widget.

“Usersnap offers more than 10 project types to collect different kinds of customer feedback,” Josef said. “The Routing Menu Widget enables the end-users to choose the format that they prefer to get in touch. The widget can also be linked to customer service desks, (such as Zendesk and Intercom), and other URLs — for example, your documentation help page.”

To manage feedback received, Usersnap’s dashboard has labels, a discussion area, robust reply-to-customer features, and a helpful statistics page.

The Usersnap team is small but mighty and diverse, speaking more than 12 languages and spanning 10 nationalities.

“The hierarchy is very flat, and we value open communication and feedback — it’s not only our customers’ feedback that is important to us!” Josef said. “There’s always exciting discussions and different perspectives. This creates a fun and upbeat working atmosphere which sparks the innovative energy needed to build a great product.”

Moving forward, Usersnap’s goal is to ensure companies can collect customer feedback at every part of the customer journey.

“To make that happen, we’re working on new methods to implement feedback collection,” Josef said. “Expect more feedback channels — we’re going beyond the widget. And watch out for more custom targeting!”