What you give up with classic user testing
Platforms like UserTesting connect you with real people who complete tasks on your site while recording their screen and voice. That is valuable — real humans, real reactions. It also comes with a cycle: write the test, recruit or target participants, wait for sessions, watch the videos, then turn what you saw into tickets. On a store that changes every week, that cycle rarely keeps up.
Tower takes the opposite trade-off. AI agents browse your store as your personas, on a schedule, and hand you findings that are already written up: a screenshot, an observation with byte-exact quotes, a severity, an estimated conversion impact and a user story.
UserTesting vs. Tower at a glance
| Human user testing | Tower | |
|---|---|---|
| Who browses | Real participants | AI agents behaving as your personas |
| Setup per test | Write tasks, choose an audience | Once: your store URL and your personas |
| Output | Videos and notes to review | Findings with capture, severity and impact; user stories exportable to Linear |
| Rhythm | Per study | On a schedule, deduplicated run to run |
| Best at | Emotions, expectations, the "why" behind a choice | Defects and frictions along the buying journey, at every release |
How Tower's "synthetic users" stay honest
AI personas are only useful if their findings are real. Three mechanisms hold Tower's to that:
- Proof is captured, not generated. Every finding ships with the screenshot of the page as served and quotes extracted byte-exact from it.
- Walking and judging are separate jobs. Walkers browse and judge nothing; analysts reread the walk and cannot return to the site; an evaluation judge screens findings before you see them.
- You have the last word. You judge each finding — actionable, false or noise — and your verdicts train the next run.
In the latest published pilot, the store owner judged 11 findings out of 11 true. One audit finds about 65% of a store's defects, two reach about 90%. We publish the misses too.
When to keep human testing
When you need to hear how a real customer feels about your brand, your pricing or a new concept, nothing replaces a person. Tower is built for the other job: making sure that, by the time you put a real person in front of your store, the broken search, the missing delivery time and the unexplained account wall are already fixed.
Start without a study plan
No panel to recruit, no script to write, nothing to install: agents read your public pages like any shopper, on any platform. Request your free first audit, see what it covers on the e-commerce UX audit page, or read the FAQ.