Product Talks: a quarterly, invite-only, mini-webinar for research teams. Listen in as our product and success teams demo new features, preview what's next on the roadmap, and answer questions from the researcher community.
✴︎ Fresh UXR insights in your inbox ✴︎
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See the ROI of User Interviews for yourself
Create a free account and start recruiting the participants you need in hours, not weeks.
Rewatch our latest Product Talk webinar, where we share our new and updated screeners, automated and collaborative scheduling, streamlined payments for teams, and a sneak peak at our new project set-up experience.
Build screeners faster with updated multiple-choice questions: We made a number improvements to our most popular question type. Researchers can bulk enter answer options for multiple choice questions and participants can write in an “Other” option.
Get more valuable input with more question types: We’re exploring several ways to help you find the right participants, including matrix questions, skip logic enhancements, and participant video and photo uploads.
On the horizon, a stronger panel over time: We are exploring ways to capture and find more valuable participant information across the User Interviews panel and Research Hub, including capturing more information on each participant with updates to screeners and opt-in forms.
📅 Scheduling with your team
Coordinate your team with session roles: You can designate who must attend and who is optional, so you can find times that work for the team and schedule only those that need to be there.
Automate scheduling for your team: Connect your calendars, set your preferences, and we’ll do the rest for you. We will find times with work for your whole team and send calendar invites and reminders, so you can focus on the research.
🛠️ Revamping the Research Workflow
Researchers have four important needs for leading research. We are redesigning the project setup and management process in User Interviews to support more fast, iterative, collaborative, and flexible research.
On the horizon, researchers can get started faster, have more flexibility, iterate as they learn, and can work collaboratively with their teammates:
Enable the reuse of best practices. Create templates for project components (e.g. screener questions, recruiting criteria)
Enable easier testing pre-launch. Create a project test mode to more easily do dry runs before you launch.
Enable research as a team sport. Automate reminders and progress updates to your collaborators and stakeholders.
Enable flexible research design. Recruit from multiple audiences or run multiple activities in the same study.
🔐 Guardrails and visibility for admins
Streamline launch with shared payments. Whether you pay by invoice, credit card, or a prepaid balance, remove decisions from the launch process by providing a primary payment method for your team. Other guardrails are in consideration now.
More visibility into usage and spend. Up next, we’re planning to provide more insight into the research happening at your company with reporting on usage and spend in User Interviews.
UI Product Talk #10: June 6, 2023
Rewatch our latest Product Talk webinar, where we share our new scheduling solution, flexible incentives, redesigned participant profiles, and more.
📅 Scheduling 2.0: an overhaul of our scheduling feature for moderated research
Global calendar syncing: Integrate with your Google or Outlook calendar, set your working hours and availability at the account level, and let us handle scheduling and conflict management across multiple projects.
Automatic, rules-based scheduling: For projects with a single moderator, you’ll soon be able to switch to automatic scheduling. Simply set your preferences for date range, minimum scheduling notice, buffer time, and start time increment. Participants will be able to book any available times that fit your scheduling rules.
A more collaborative approach to scheduling: Up next, we’re working on automated scheduling for groups of researchers, as well as deeper collaboration features such as options for collective or round robin session distribution, and collaborator roles.
💸 Flexible incentives: adjust incentives after launching a project, or offer participants bonuses
Edit incentives post-launch: Research rarely goes exactly as planned. We’re opening up the ability for researchers to adjust incentives at the project- or participant-level after launching a project, without needing to reach out to our support team.
Common use cases for flex incentives: (1) Not getting the number of applications you need? Learn and adjust as you go by increasing the incentive amount to attract more candidates. (2) Have a great participant on the line that you want to dive a little deeper with? If your conversation goes long, offer them a bonus for their time.
Beyond incentives—supporting flexible research: On the horizon are bigger updates to make our recruitment workflow flex to support various kinds of research. For example, recruiting from multiple sources, running continuous interviews, or including multiple research activities within the one project.
👤 Redesigned participant profiles: access all the user data you need to make the right recruiting decisions
Complete participant profiles for Hub projects: You can now access your participants’ full set of profile data and project history directly within your Hub projects. The new participant data tab provides a snapshot of activity stats, all of their user attributes, and a history of participation that you can drill into for session and screener details.
Universal upgrades to participant profiles: A fresh new design is coming soon to both Hub and Recruit participant profiles. And looking further ahead, we’re exploring bringing feedback and notes left by your teammates into the profile view, so you can access all the info you need to make the right recruiting decisions.
➕ And more Hub highlights: Zapier integration, bulk emails, Hub search
Zapier data integration: No code, no problem. Our Zapier integration makes it easy to push useful customer data from Salesforce, Hubspot, and 5,000+ other tools into Hub for more sophisticated targeting and segmentation.
If you haven’t had a chance to try it out, we have some exciting news for you—we are opening our Zapier integration to all plans (now including Essential and Free Forever) so that even more teams can send data into Hub.
Bulk emails: Communicate regularly with your Hub population to keep them engaged. Send emails about research initiatives to segments of your panel, without needing to create a project.
Hub search: We’ll be introducing a global search bar to the Hub database so you can quickly find participants by name or basic information.
Thanks for joining us for Product Talk #10! We’ll see you back here next quarter.
UI Product Talk #9: March 2, 2023
Watch highlights from Product Talk, where we gave a demo of streamlined recruitment with Hub, previewed the latest features for running large unmoderated studies, and talked about the best ways to enable your team and accelerate their research.
⚡ Streamlining recruitment with the Hub API, segments, and automated invites
Sam walks us through the dream 3-step scenario of recruiting your own users into research projects:
Hub participant API: Get up-to-date participant data constantly feeding from your CRM and data warehouses into Hub. You now have multiple setup options including building custom integrations with our API, using our Census integration to connect your data infrastructure, and coming soon, our integration with Zapier for a no-code solution!
Reusable segments: Quickly find the right participants using our new segments feature. Filter on any user attributes or project history, then save your segments to reuse for future studies.
Automated invitations: Get just enough participants to fill your study. Recruitment becomes fast and hands-off when you use email templates, invite rules, and batch invites.
👩💻 Recruiting for large unmoderated studies with User Interviews
Zoe shares how we’re helping teams recruit and manage participants for large unmoderated studies:
Redesigned participant tracker: The participant tracking page now features funnel views and project snapshots, so you can see at-a-glance how participants are progressing through your study. Coming soon, bulk actions will enable you to send messages and pay incentives in bulk, speeding up management of large cohorts.
Sprig integration: Run unmoderated tests in Sprig while recruiting with User Interviews. Using the integration speeds up project setup, and handles “redirect links” to enable easy tracking of participants across tools.
⛹️ Enabling your team with project templates, roles, and permissions
Carol shows research operations folks how to enable their teammates to easily get started with their own research:
Dashboard & templates: Get a broader view of all the research happening in your org with our newly designed project dashboard—now featuring project counts and filters. Create reusable project templates to accelerate the work of your team.
Security & permissions: Do more research with less risk. Give your researchers access to only the participants they need through multiple panels. Assign roles to manage permissions for each member. Protect your participants by hiding personally-identifiable information (PII).
🛣️ On the roadmap
JH looks ahead at what’s next on the roadmap for our product team:
In development now: We’re currently building an improved scheduling experience, a participant data integration with Zapier, and adding functionality for bulk communications to your Hub panel.
On the horizon: Longer-term, we’re looking into how we can support ad-hoc and continuous research, provide greater visibility into participant data and history, and create modular components and configurations for faster project setup.
Thanks for hanging out with us in Product Talk! We’ll see you back here next quarter.
UI Product Talk #8: December 1, 2022
Watch highlights from our final Product Talk webinar of the year. Meet members of our product team and learn how we’re improving the product experience to help teams run research with the right participants quickly and easily. Plus, get a sneak peek of what we’re planning in 2023.
⭐ Maintaining high quality as our panel passes 2 million
Improved fraud reporting: With a 99% satisfaction rate on completed sessions,the prevalence of fraud amongst our panel remains low. If you believe a participant is misrepresenting themselves, you can now flag them at any point before, during, or after your study, right in the app.
Preventing fraud with machine learning: As our panel grows, we’re getting more sophisticated with how we identify potential fraud. From signals at time of application to platform activity, we’re using machine learning models to detect and remove fraudulent participants before they affect your studies. We’ve seen a 50% reduction in reported fraud over the last 5 months.
👩💻 Running unmoderated research and surveys with UI
Simple & flexible participant experience: We’ve updated our unmoderated study flow to be simple (send participants direct to task), and to flex up when you need it to (support for NDAs, screeners, and task instructions). We’re setting better context and clearer expectations for participants throughout the participant journey, and this work has already resulted in a 50% increase in completion rates for approved participants.
Easy management of unmoderated projects: On the researcher side, we’ve recently launched a series of integrations (Qualtrics, Typeform, Sprig, and more) to speed up project set up and track participants without redirects. Next up, we’re working on better tracking and faster performance when managing large unmoderated projects.
📈 Scaling customer research with Hub
Assign roles & permissions: As teams grow on UI, they need to control access levels and permissions for different types of users. Our roles feature is now out of beta, meaning that users can be assigned an Admin role (maximum permissions over team settings), a Researcher role (access Hub and launch projects), and coming soon, a Teammate role (collaborate on team projects).
Managing large populations in Hub: Your panels are growing to tens and hundreds of thousands of users! We’re helping you wrangle these larger populations with performance upgrades, better control over columns and views, and coming soon, dynamic segments.
🔮 Looking ahead to 2023: our 3 product focus areas
Research experience: The goal? Anyone can make a habit out of research, because it’s delightfully easy. We’re thinking about scheduling improvements, more testing tool integrations, and supporting ad-hoc, flexible flows.
Panel value: The goal? Your panel gets more valuable over time, as more useful data is captured with each study, and made accessible in UI. We’re thinking about filtering on screener responses, integrating with your data sources, and providing greater visibility into all activity.
Team Operations: The goal? Research Ops can empower their organizations to do more research, because UI supports large teams and best practices at scale. We’re thinking about refining roles and permissions, introducing activity reports, and building upon defaults and templates.
If these product areas sound interesting to you, we’re always looking for feedback and input from our power users! Reach out to your customer success manager to get involved in upcoming research with us.
That’s it for Product Talk #8. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next year!
UI Product Talk #7: August 31, 2022
Product experts JH Forster, Carol Guest, and Paolo Appley walk through the latest news for Research Hub and Recruit.
☝️ Build trust in the quality of your participants
Easily report participants: while fraud overall is very low, we’ve added tools to strengthen your feedback.
Better signal fraud: researchers now have a way to flag misrepresentation or inappropriate behavior prior, during, and after a session.
⚡ Revamp the unmoderated research experience
Set clear expectations: we’ve made task requirements more explicit, and researchers can now bring those right into emails.
Be truly hands off: more context to each step means a more streamlined participant experience, and less monitoring for you.
More integrations, less set up: we’ve partnered with Lookback and SurveyMonkey already, and have some exciting integrations with Typeform, Sprig, Qualtrics XM, and Loop11 coming soon.
🔎 Connect Researchers, Participants & ReOps through Hub
Manage on the organization level: you can now add other teams which have access to their own panel of users. This could be a different product line or persona, so each researcher has access to the very specific panel that they need to do research.
Configure your branding and communication settings: Team Admins can configure control email themes, email templates, and sender profiles, to guide researchers towards the best and safest options.
Many options to build your panel: add participants from a number of sources - like CSV file, links to join, and individual direct adds.
That’s it for Product Talk #7. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you back here next quarter!
UI Product Talk #6: May 25, 2022
Watch our product leaders JH Forster and Carol Guest walk through a dozen of our favorite new and upcoming features, plus provide an update on integrations, security, and accessibility.
♻️ Close the loop on projects & sessions within UI
Close a project in-app: Kick off the process to close a project once your study is over to prevent over-recruiting and keep your dashboard clean. Our team will automatically be prompted to review and complete the close process for you.
Report fraud in-app: If you suspect a participant in your study may be misrepresenting themself, you can now report them directly from the app. This will automatically prompt our team to investigate and speed up a resolution.
⚡ Streamline unmoderated user research
Task link call-to-action: We’ve introduced a “task link” field for unmoderated studies, which gets translated as a clear call-to-action for participants on confirmation screens and emails.
Lookback integration: When you connect accounts and link to a Lookback project, we will automatically display Lookback session data within User Interviews, so you'll have easy access to your participants’ recordings and tasks.
SurveyMonkey integration (in progress): Coming soon: automatically track participants across UI and SurveyMonkey projects as they start, abandon or complete surveys.
Integrations roadmap (in exploration): We’re exploring future integrations with other popular survey and unmoderated testing tools. We want researchers to be able to set it and forget it, spending significantly less time and effort managing unmoderated projects than it does today.
🔎 Manage a panel of your own users with Hub
Hide & reorder columns: Hide, drag, and drop columns to create your own custom view of the participant table that shows only the user data that’s relevant to your study.
Opt-in form & participant source filtering: We’ve added two new filters to Hub — filter your entire panel by one or more opt-in forms, or filter by the first source through which they joined your panel such as CSV, opt-in form, project, or API.
View & edit user profiles: We’ve replaced the tiny blue icon with a clearer “view” button. Click into any user’s profile to view their past activity, edit participant information, or invite them to a project.
Hub API (in alpha): Our Hub API Alpha program is open for applications! Contact success@userinterviews.com to join. The Hub API can be used to delete participants across systems for GDPR, refresh participant profiles with recent data, and add new participants securely.
🚂 Set guardrails for researchers in your team
Default email settings (in progress): Admins can set communication guardrails for the whole research team with the ability to specify a default email theme. Coming soon: default template sets and sender profiles.
Invite limits (in progress): Admins can limit the number of participants that a researcher can invite to a study to keep the panel fresh. Limits are set as a multiple of the total number of requested participants.
Multiple teams in an org (in progress): We’re exploring new ways to give admins control over which participants different groups of researchers within their org are able to access.
🔐 Research with confidence knowing UI is secure & accessible
New security features: We’ve rolled out two-factor authentication to all researcher accounts and added ReCAPTCHA to opt-in forms. User Interviews has also recently completed a SOC 2 Type 1 audit.
Accessibility improvements (in progress): We’re making accessibility improvements to ensure all users have a good experience with our application. This includes ensuring pages are readable by screen readers and navigable by keyboard and touch inputs.
That’s it for Product Talk #6. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you back here next quarter!
UI Product Talk #5: February 24, 2022
We’re excited to share with you some early 2022 highlights and upcoming releases from our product team. These improvements cover various aspects of research recruitment — finding professional matches for B2B studies, building out your panel in Research Hub, reviewing participants faster, and integrating with tools you already use.
Targeting seniority & skills: You can now specify seniority and skills to find closer professional matches for your B2B studies. Looking for managers who use Salesforce? Or business owners with project management experience? We’ve got you covered.
Building a deeper panel of professionals: We’re launching a new participant referral program to grow our panel in highly-requested professional segments, for example software, IT, finance, and data professionals.
📈 Build a panel of your own users
CSV imports with fewer errors: 95% of all Hub participants are uploaded via CSV. We’re introducing better error handling on CSV imports to surface data issues earlier and give researchers clearer paths to resolve them.
Hub participant API: We’re working on an API that helps researchers to more easily keep their Hub panels up to date. Using the API, you can build custom integrations to automatically sync participant data between User Interviews and the internal or third party platforms you use.
⚡ Review participants faster
Profile overview featuring key criteria: Set your own key decision-making criteria when building your project, and we’ll make sure it’s highly visible during participant review. The new profile overview tab lets you identify at a glance if a participant meets your baseline requirements and key criteria, expediting review and recruitment decisions.
Take action immediately: Minimize scrolling through lengthy participant profiles. The new “sticky” footer houses the most common actions researchers take — instantly “Approve and Invite” a participant, mark them as “Not a Fit”, or else move on to the next profile.
🔗 Use research tools of your choice with integrations
Connect with participants via Google Meet: We’ve already got a Zoom integration. Now you can connect your Google Account to streamline the process of creating unique Google Meet links for your research sessions.
Testing tool exploration: This year, we’ll be introducing new integrations that enable you to use the research tools of your choice. We’re currently investigating which tools to integrate with, and an early focus will be on unmoderated testing tools.
That’s it for Product Talk #5. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you back here next quarter!
UI Product Talk #4: November 18, 2021
In our final Product Talk of 2021, we’re excited to share with you our five favorite product updates that have recently shipped. These are some of the most-requested features from researchers looking to streamline their recruitment workflow. In fact, many of you contributed insights and feedback throughout the development process, so we hope you’re as excited as we are to see them come to life in the product.
Filters: Find your best-fit participants, fast. Apply one or more filters to your participant queue to quickly and precisely seek out the participants you most want to talk to. Combine any number of characteristics and screener questions to meet your participant recruitment goals — as specific as they may be.
Previous/Next: Stay in the review flow. Navigate between participants profiles using previous/next buttons to consider more participants in less time.
Scannable Profiles: Make a quick assessment on fit. Improvements to profile readability make it easier to see at a glance whether a participant meets your key criteria.
👩🏼💼 Improved B2B matching
Structured job titles: Structured data results in better matches. Researchers and participants are now selecting from the same set of job titles, meaning you can better target professional personas for your B2B studies.
Professional targeting options: The ability to target participants by job level is right around the corner. Skills, occupation groups, and other professional characteristics are in active discovery.
🛡️ Enhanced fraud detection
Preventative checks: Fraud on our platform is rare, and we’re working to make it even rarer. We’ve implemented preventative checks to quickly spot misrepresentation and suspicious accounts, to ensure our participant pool remains high quality.
✉️ Better response rates to Hub invites
Email metrics: Have you ever hit send on an invitation and felt like your email has entered a black hole? Not anymore! With new email metrics available for Hub projects, you have visibility and control over email performance.
Resend invitations: A natural follow-on from metrics, you can now send follow-up invites. Optimize subject lines and email copy to improve response rates the second time round.
🔒 Easier compliance with privacy regulations
Data consent notices: Researchers care about handling personal data in compliant ways. With our new DCN editor, you can customize your consent notice, apply text formatting, and link out to a more detailed privacy policy.
Include a footer: Have more privacy information to share? Make it easily accessible to participants with the new option of adding a custom footer to all participant-facing pages.
Fresh from our company retreat, we also wanted to give you a sneak peek of some bigger things we’re scoping for 2022 that we think will help researchers scale their work and impact.
🎉 2022 Sneak Peek
Integrations: One of the most frequent questions we get is, “When are you integrating with [insert testing tool of choice]?”. Well, we’re excited to share that integrations are on the roadmap for 2022 and the primary focus for Logistics pod. We care deeply about making the recruiting workflow easy, which includes simpler ways for researchers to plug and play with their preferred tools and methodologies.
Team Enablement: Research is a team sport. As we onboard larger teams and their volume of research increases, new needs and opportunities emerge. We’ll be expanding the product team and creating a new pod to ensure that the experience scales well for our largest, most active customers.
And of course, we’ll continue our focus on the enduring outcomes of our other two pods. As a reminder:
Matching pod is tackling marketplace health and the opportunity of how to best balance supply and demand.
Hub pod is driving toward better awareness and adoption of Hub, and an awesome product experience once folks get there.
That’s it for Product Talk #4. See you in 2022 for more product highlights!
We started our second Talk with big news—we recently raised $10M in our series A, and have since grown our product and engineering teams to start releasing more features, faster. We're also investing in our site infrastructure to improve performance & delivery. Our product team has a lot of big builds coming, and would love your feedback.
We gave a sneak peek into features our team is currently building, including:
Make launching a project easier
Previewing screeners and testing skip logic in the project builder
Updates to the Characteristics section of the project builder
Help participants get matched to more relevant studies
A new studies page experience for participants
A redesigned participant sign-up flow that should should boost
Improvements in efficiency of our behind the scenes participant targeting system
Reduce no-shows
Making it easier for participants to add confirmed sessions to their calendar
Better support organizations with many researchers
Allow researchers to organize into teams within the same organization
UI Product Talk #1: February 25, 2021
In the first ever Talk, we reviewed our recently launched Zoom integration, Document Signing feature, and our newest Hub features—Invite Rules, Email Themes, and Email Templates. We also looked forward to launching our new project builder, supporting multiple teams in an organization, improving our participant matching, and improving our site's accessibility.
