Moderated usability testing without the scheduling
Moderated usability testing works because a person is in the room to ask "why did you do that?" Moderators gives you that probing from an AI moderator that talks with each of your customers by chat or voice, so you get moderated depth without booking a single calendar slot. You receive findings with quotes from every conversation.
Try to export last month's report. Say what you are thinking.
I expected it under Reports, so I am looking there.
What made you look there first?
The menu says Reports, and I assumed exports live there.
Quote from the interview
“I would recommend it, once someone else has set it up.”
What does a moderator add to a usability test?
Unmoderated tasks tell you what people clicked. A moderator tells you what they expected, what confused them and what they almost did instead. The difference lives in the follow-up question, the small nudge that turns "it was fine" into "I could not tell whether my changes were saved."
Why do most teams skip it?
Because each session costs a researcher an hour of live time, plus scheduling, plus notes afterward. A team that wants twenty sessions before a release usually settles for five, or for none. The method is sound. The logistics are the obstacle.
What happens in one conversation?
You describe what you want to learn and who you are talking to. Moderators drafts an interview guide with goals, questions and follow-ups. Your customer opens your link and talks through a recent experience with your product: what they tried to do, where they hesitated, what they expected to happen. The AI moderator asks the next question based on what was just said, not from a fixed list.
Does it watch the screen?
No. Moderators moderates the conversation, not a screen recording or a prototype session. It is the right fit when your question is about experience and expectation: why people abandon a step, how they describe a feature in their own words, what they thought a button would do. If you need to see cursor paths, pair it with whatever session capture you already use.
- Ask people to recall the last time they used a feature and describe it step by step.
- Probe the moment a task went wrong, then ask what they did next.
- Test the language of a new flow by asking what each label means to them.
How do findings reach you?
Each conversation is transcribed. Across conversations, Moderators groups what people said into themes and attaches the exact quotes, so a claim like "pricing confusion appears in most interviews" points to the words behind it. You can open the transcript for any quote. A reader who was not in the study can trust the summary because the evidence sits beside it.
Where do participants come from?
You invite them. Moderators does not recruit or run a respondent panel. You paste the link into an email, an in-app message or a support reply, and your own customers answer. For usability questions this is often better, since they actually use the product.
How many sessions can you run?
The Team plan includes 400 chat interviews and 300 voice minutes each period. A study that would have been eight live sessions can become forty conversations that finish over a weekend. Read more on how AI moderated research works, or compare approaches in remote user testing software.
Who uses it this way?
Product managers checking a flow before launch, researchers who want broader coverage than live sessions allow, and UX research teams that need a first pass before choosing which sessions to run live.
What does it cost?
Annual billing is the default and takes 50% off. There is no free plan. A used limit does not come back within the period.
- Starter: $99/month, $49.50/month billed annually. 100 chat interviews, 120 voice minutes, 1 seat.
- Team: $249/month, $124.50/month billed annually. 400 chat interviews, 300 voice minutes, 5 seats, custom-branded link.
- Scale: $599/month, $299.50/month billed annually. 1,000 chat interviews, 750 voice minutes, 15 seats, findings repository, API.
- Enterprise: $1,499/month, $749.50/month billed annually. 2,500 chat interviews, 1,800 voice minutes, SSO, roles, SLA, invoices, data retention controls.
$249 divided by 400 chat interviews is about 62 cents per interview at the Team limit, before the annual discount. See every detail on the pricing page.
Ready to moderate your next usability study?
Write the question, send the link and read the quotes. The demo on the home page runs a short text interview so you can see the moderator probe before you decide.