AI-generated summary
The rise in competition and widespread digitalization accelerated by the pandemic have compelled startups and companies to prioritize user experience (UX). Users now expect seamless, personalized, and responsive digital interactions across devices, influenced by their use of OTT applications and platforms. Spanish startups, embracing innovation and evolving user habits, face pressure to deliver superior digital experiences. UserZoom, a Spanish startup headquartered in San Francisco, exemplifies this trend by offering an end-to-end Experience Insights Management (XIM) solution. With over 300 employees, offices in four countries, and clients including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, UserZoom recently raised €85 million, reflecting the booming demand for UX services. Their platform combines customizable study tools, a large panel of users for feedback, and advanced analytics, catering to companies seeking to refine digital engagement.
The pandemic has broadened digital adoption beyond tech-savvy users, making inclusive and accessible UX critical. Customer experience (CX) is now a key differentiator in a saturated digital market, where personalized communication is essential to retain users. Successful UX, according to UserZoom’s CEO Alfonso de la Nuez, is simple, aesthetically pleasing, and tailored to the target audience, functioning consistently across devices. He emphasizes that UX must be a company-wide cultural commitment, central to product development and decision-making. Looking ahead, he foresees UX evolving toward automation and AI-driven insights, enabling businesses to act swiftly on user data. Ultimately, the ideal UX fulfills users’ expectations, fostering lasting relationships through personalized, multi-channel interactions.
We spoke with Alfonso de la Nuez, CEO of UserZoom, about tips and practices to improve the user experience or UX in any startup.
The increase in competition and the definitive digitalization of the population after the pandemic force startups and companies to focus on UX: UserZoom offers effective answers.
In recent years, attention to user experience (UX) by companies and startups has grown impetuously under the demand to build fluid and consistent digital experiences across the company’s different touchpoints. Users are increasingly demanding in this regard: the use of OTT (Over The Top) applications and sites has accustomed them to dynamic and personalized interfaces, with fast response times and the possibility of easily moving from desktop to mobile.
Spanish startups are part of this general context and by their very nature are obliged to intercept innovation, both technological and in user habits. As Alfonso de la Nuez, co-founder and co-CEO of UserZoom, explains, “today all companies offer a digital experience, not just those that were born digital. The pandemic has only been the most disruptive accelerator and now there is no choice”.
The success of UserZoom
UserZoom is a Spanish startup based in San Francisco (USA), with more than 300 employees and offices in four different countries. Its activity focuses on innovative UX and CX services. In last April’s
According to de la Nuez, the success of UserZoom is the success of an entire sector. “We and our competition are growing more than ever. This year we could reach $100 million in sales and we were at about $25 million a couple of years ago. This spectacular growth does not happen by chance, something is happening in the market,” says the executive.
UserZoom’s activity is divided into three main blocks: the first is the software to create personalized studies with the questions and tasks that the client wants to address to the target user; the second part is the panel, the group of people made up of about 150,000 contacts of the startup itself in the US and Europe, to which are added many other groups of other companies, whose business is precisely to have panels in various areas of the world.
The third leg is analytics: as the responses come in from the dashboard, the dashboard analyzes them so that UserZoom users/customers can see the results in an organized and accessible way. The business model has two options: the direct exploitation of the tool by customers, and a consulting service offered by the Spanish startup.
The pandemic accelerates a process that was already underway
The pandemic has brought previously excluded sectors of the population closer to the digital world. For this reason,
Customer Experience (CX) is the tool to navigate a hyper-competitive market, which has seen the pandemic as an accelerator of the digitalization processes that were already underway. In the attention economy, companies struggle to attract and retain users, while users are often overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive.
According to Infobip’s “Create moments of human connection” survey, 74% of consumers believe that brand communication lacks personalization, and almost half (47%) say they ignore any non-personalized message. In this sense, the CEO of UserZooM clarifies, “a good UX is an inclusive UX that is customized for the target audience .”
In 2018, the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company conducted a major study to measure the revenue resulting from a good design culture. The authors found that a design optimized for a good user experience can increase revenue almost twice as fast compared to competitors who don’t invest in it.
UX areas that Spanish startups should take care of
In the opinion of the CEO of UserZoom, “a successful UX is one that adapts and is oriented to its specific environment, so there is no universal recipe. However, it can be said that a good UX is one that presents a simple, minimalist and clean interface, but also with attention to aesthetics. Simple doesn’t mean ugly. The copy, the message and the language of navigation and content must use a format for children, without technicalities, something that, however, is very difficult to achieve,” he explains.
There are cases such as Uber or Airbnb, whose value lies only in the interface with which they maintain the relationship with the end customer. They don’t need to have cars or hotels.
In fact, the change for startups and organizations in general must be holistic: “for a company to be truly customer-centric , it cannot simply adopt a methodology, it is a cultural issue that starts from the top and crosses all departments, from the beginning of the company and not when it already has a prototype,” warns de la Nuez. He also adds: “The customer is the center of everything, from there, you have to develop the product, constantly follow up with user feedback and with this data make decisions. In addition, there is no longer a difference between B2B and B2C, UX is a crossfunctional and cultural strategy that starts from the top”
Personalization and automation
From an interaction standpoint, consumers value the ability to communicate through many different channels . This explains why services like WhatsApp (messaging app usage saw a 40% increase during lockdown) are becoming increasingly popular: people want to communicate with a business as easily as they do with their family and friends.
Therefore, to create an effective UX/CX, Spanish startups must assess the peculiarities of the individuals they are targeting and integrate different platforms that allow them to communicate homogeneously at the right time, either by sending an email with a personalized product suggestion or a discount via SMS. It’s these personalized moments that customers will remember and that will form the foundation of a long-lasting relationship.
However, according to Alfonso de la Nuez, the future of UX lies in automation: “I believe that our destiny is to become a kind of AI company. Google Analytics offers cold data without interpretations, we are instead more on the hot data side, because we have direct contact with the potential customer/user. We want to be able to offer this hot and rich data but in a very automated way. The goal is for our customers not to spend so much time doing research but making decisions,” says the businessman, for whom, finally: “the perfect user experience is the one that meets what the end user wants and expects from it.”
