User acceptance testing, or UAT, is the phase where a small group of real users trial HiThrive in your live environment before it goes out to everyone. It catches the things that technical testing cannot: a value icon that renders wrong in Slack, a manager budget that was configured for the wrong team, a reward catalog that looks sparse in a particular country.
Most implementations run UAT across three to five business days with a group of ten to twenty testers, then launch the following week.
This article covers how to structure UAT and what to test. To run it, make a copy of the HiThrive UAT Tracker — a workbook with every test case pre-written, organized by track, and ready to assign.
Why UAT is worth the week
Your integration can pass every technical check and still produce a poor first impression. The gap between "the system works" and "the experience is right" is where UAT lives.
The most common issues surfaced during UAT are not bugs. They are configuration decisions that looked correct in a settings panel and turned out differently in practice:
Company value icons that read clearly at full size but not at the size they render in a shoutout
Manager budgets set by role that do not reflect actual team sizes
Celebration announcements batched weekly when the team expected them daily
A reward catalog that is well stocked in your headquarters country and thin everywhere else
Point tiers that sound reasonable in a guideline document but feel wrong when someone is actually choosing one
Each of these is trivial to fix before launch and awkward to fix after.
Choosing your testers
Aim for ten to twenty people. Enough for real coverage, small enough to coordinate.
Include:
Three to five individual contributors from different teams
Two to three managers with direct reports, ideally with different team sizes
Your platform admin and anyone who will manage the program day to day
At least one person per country if your rollout spans multiple locations
One or two people who were not involved in the implementation, to catch what familiarity hides
Consider including: the internal communications or People team members who will write your launch messaging. Testing the platform first makes their announcement materially better.
The five testing tracks
Testing is organized by role rather than by feature, so each person only works through what is relevant to them.
Track | Who runs it | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
Employee experience | 3 to 5 individual contributors | Every implementation |
Manager experience | 2 to 3 people managers | Every implementation |
Admin and configuration | Platform owner, program managers | Every implementation |
Celebrations | Program owner | Only if birthdays, anniversaries, or new hire announcements launch on day one |
International users | One tester per country | Only if your rollout spans multiple countries |
Testing both surfaces
HiThrive runs in two places: your chat platform, either Slack or Microsoft Teams, and the web app. These are separate interfaces to the same underlying system, and they can behave differently.
A shoutout composed in Slack and one composed in the web app follow different paths. Card previews render differently. Notification behavior differs. Testing one surface and assuming the other works is the single most common gap we see.
Each test case in the tracker is tagged:
Chat — run in Slack or Microsoft Teams
Web — run in the HiThrive web application
Both — run in each surface and confirm the behavior matches
Before you start
Open your copy of the UAT Tracker and work through the setup items below.
All testers provisioned and able to log in
Chat app installed and visible to testers
Point allowances allocated to Employee-track testers
Manager budgets allocated to Manager-track testers
Company values, branding, and cards configured
Testers briefed on scope and timeline
Sends during UAT are real. Shoutouts post, points move, and recipients are notified. If you do not want testing activity visible company-wide, create a private channel and route testing there.
What to test in each track
Employee experience
The flows your entire workforce will use. Covers login through SSO, the home feed, composing and sending shoutouts in both surfaces, value tagging, point allowances and limits, the AI drafting assistant, browsing the rewards catalog, and completing a redemption.
Pay particular attention to the redemption flow. It is the moment recognition becomes tangible, and it is the flow most likely to reveal a catalog or fulfillment issue.
Manager experience
Everything above, plus the manager dashboard, reporting hierarchy views, spot award budgets, the full spot award send flow including card selection, approval routing if configured, and manager notifications when a direct report is recognized.
The 25-recipient limit on dynamic cards is worth testing explicitly. Managers sending to large teams will hit it, and it is better to discover that during UAT than in front of a department.
Admin and configuration
User provisioning and deprovisioning, manager hierarchy accuracy, values and channel configuration, adjusting allowances and budgets, and reporting.
Run your redemption report against what your payroll team actually needs. Confirm the fields match their import format before the first cycle rather than after.
Celebrations
Only relevant if celebrations are live at launch. Covers the upcoming celebrations calendar, card previews, milestone rules, and the three announcement types: birthdays, work anniversaries, and new hires.
New hire announcements deserve specific attention. Test that timing fires correctly relative to start date, and that teammates can react and welcome the person. An announcement nobody engages with lands worse than no announcement at all.
International users
Login access by country, catalog relevance and availability in each location, currency display, cross-region recognition, and celebration timing across time zones.
Logging and triaging issues
Record everything that fails, then sort by severity:
Severity | Definition | Action |
|---|---|---|
Blocker | Prevents launch | Must be resolved before go-live |
Major | Significant impact on experience | Resolve before launch if possible |
Minor | Cosmetic or edge case | Can be addressed after launch |
Most UAT findings are Minor. A clean UAT with three or four minor items is a normal, healthy result. A UAT that surfaces nothing usually means testing was too shallow.
Closing out
Hold a short debrief once testing is complete. Walk the issue log, confirm Blockers are resolved, and agree on what ships now versus what gets picked up after launch.
Then capture sign-off per track and confirm your launch date. The UAT Tracker includes a sign-off tab for this.
A note on scope creep. UAT surfaces good ideas as well as issues. Resist the urge to act on all of them before launch. Log the enhancement requests, launch on schedule, and revisit them at your thirty-day review.