Japan’s UI Scope planning to expand its usability testing service

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InnoBeta CEO Daisuke Hiraishi
InnoBeta CEO Daisuke Hiraishi

This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013.

One of the four Japanese startups that pitched at B Dash Camp in Osaka was InnoBeta, the creator of UIscope, a service for testing usability of smartphone-based media.

The company’s CEO Daisuke Hiraishi explained a little more about their service on Tuesday, and revealed more about their plans moving forward. He highlighted the need for qualitative market research to be brought online, noting that the market size is about $3.3 billion globally [1].

UI Scope matches developers and testers, providing the latter with web cameras to explain and comment on a user interface as they test it out. The result that developers will see is a video and a questionnaire. They have 5000 testers, with each tester costing 3000 yen (about $30), with UI Scope taking 2500 yen and 500 yen going to testers. So far the startup has accumulated over registered 500 clients over 10 months, including the likes of Yahoo, Capcom, GungHo, and many startups [2].

Readers may recall that previously featured InnoBeta back in April when they partnered with Mixi’s Deploygate to create ‘DeployGate Scope’ to help developers crowdsource usability testing, not only for live apps, but also for prototypes still in development.

So what does the future look like for UI Scope? Hiraishi pointed to three strategies in particular:

  1. Global expansion, starting with Korea where they will provide testing for 30 different apps. They are also planning China expansion as well. Local partners will help them bring in new testers.
  2. Expand testing methods: Interview and group discussion can be done online as well.
  3. Currently they focus mobile but they can also test things like hardware or even consumer products such as shampoo.

Hiraishi closed his pitch by predicting that his company will be the number one online qualitative research company in the world. That’s certainly a lofty goal, but their first few steps have been promising.


  1. In online quantitative research, they point out Macromill and Survey Monkey as existing market solutions.  ↩

  2. I wonder if a corporate testing plan, or some sort of premium offerings, might be a way to increase their revenue.  ↩