Case Study

From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: How a Retail App Team Reduced UX Fielding Time by 76%

Client Overview

A major North American retail app’s UX team, operating in fast-paced two-week sprints, needed to validate navigation flows, onboarding experiences, and micro-interactions before development handoff. But traditional sample sourcing couldn’t keep up—launches were slow, targeting was inconsistent, and data quality varied.

By partnering with Zamplia, the team dramatically reduced UX fielding time. With real-time deployment, behavioral targeting, and built-in quality controls, Zamplia enabled faster launches, cleaner insights, and better alignment between research and sprint planning.

Industry

Consumer Retail / Mobile E-Commerce.

Team

UX Research & Product Design.

Scope

Ongoing usability testing, prototype validation, and user journey evaluation across multiple feature teams.

Background & Objectives

The client’s UX team supported a fast-paced mobile product group working in 2-week sprints. With new features rolling out continuously, the UX team’s mandate was to validate designs—navigation flows, onboarding, and micro-interactions—before handoff to development.

Their process depended on collecting high-quality, actionable user feedback from specific audiences:

Mobile shoppers aged 25–45
High-frequency app users
Participants split evenly across English and French Canadian regions

They needed to launch quickly, collect clean data, and inform decisions in time for sprint reviews.

The Challenge

Despite an experienced in-house team and a trusted toolkit, their biggest bottleneck was sample sourcing. Traditional panel providers were slow, rigid, and unreliable when it came to:

Speed: Launching a simple usability test still took 3–5 days to get live
Targeting: Regional quotas were inconsistently filled; targeting by app behavior was imprecise
Quality: Open-end responses often lacked depth or showed signs of inattentiveness
Transparency: No insight into participant quality until data was fully delivered

This inefficiency created downstream issues—testing often had to be cut or deprioritized due to time pressure, and product decisions were made without research input.

The Zamplia Solution

Zamplia onboarded the client within 24 hours, giving their UX team direct access to real-time survey deployment and a responsive audience network.

Key Features Deployed:

🎯 Behavioral Targeting

Screener logic allowed selection based on app usage frequency, mobile device type, and regional targeting (including Quebec-specific quotas).

⚙️ Instant Launch with Full Control

Using Zamplia’s platform, the UX team could upload their screener, launch the test within hours, and monitor live quotas and incidence rates.

🛡 Built-in Quality Engine – Calibr8

Every respondent was filtered through Zamplia’s Calibr8 system, which provided 8 layers of protection.

Bot detection via IP/device fingerprinting
Attention validation using red herring and straightlining detection
AI-authenticity scoring of open-ends
Duplicate traffic filtering across global sources

📊 Live Monitoring Dashboard

UX researchers had direct visibility into completes, dropouts, and data integrity scores while fielding.

The Results

With Zamplia in place, the team fielded and completed the entire test within 12 hours—a process that had previously taken 5 business days.

Metric	Before Zamplia	With Zamplia	Improvement
Time to Launch	3–5 days	Under 2 hours	80–90% faster
Time to Full Field	3–4 days	12 hours	76% faster
Fraudulent Respondents	4–6% flagged post-field	0% flagged (Calibr8 filtered in real-time)	100% clean dataset
Regional Completes	60–70% fill on Quebec quotas	100% quota fill	Full regional representation
Actionable Open-Ends	~60% usable	92% usable	53% increase in response quality

Key Takeaways

Agility Matters: The ability to test, learn, and iterate quickly helped the UX team increase their influence in sprint planning sessions.
Data Confidence = Better Design Decisions: Clean, high-quality user input led to faster consensus between UX, product, and engineering teams.
One Partner, Full Control: Zamplia replaced multiple vendor relationships with a single, easy-to-use portal, saving both time and overhead.