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Latest release 9/25 - 💸 Improved prepaid balance & payment method management
If you’re an admin, you can now activate or deactivate specific payment methods to control which options are available to your team. Simplify tracking and managing project expenses while enabling researchers to launch projects confidently, knowing that they’ve selected the correct payment method set up for the team.
You can manage your team’s payment methods in your Admin settings, under the “Team Billing” tab. Under Available payment methods, simply toggle on/off to configure which payment methods are shown to your researchers at the time of project launch.
If your team is using a prepaid balance, you now have the option to automatically share a balance with the entire team in one click! In situations where you have multiple balances with different user permissions, you will still be able to grant access to each team member individually.
We know that scheduling for moderated research can be hard—we’ve heard this from many of you firsthand. So today we’re thrilled to be launching a completely revamped experience of our scheduling workflow. We designed it with one goal in mind: to make scheduling easier for researchers. With a single calendar to manage all projects and automated, rules-based scheduling, you can truly set it and forget it.
→ Check out all of the new features and more on our Scheduling page
Configuring your scheduling preferences takes just a couple of minutes, and you only have to do it once. The flow looks like this: connect your Google calendar, set your availability and scheduling preferences, and then let our system take care of automatically booking the sessions for you.
💡Note: The new automated scheduling experience is currently available for Google calendar only, coming soon to Microsoft 365 Business accounts
What’s new:
Try out automated scheduling for your next moderated project!
Note: This feature is currently in a phased release, so you may not have access to it just yet—stay tuned for updates on the full release.
Researchers can now search for participants in the Hub table using their first name, last name, email address, and phone number! The search bar is located above the Hub table view, to the right of the Bulk actions dropdown. Simply type in your search and your query will run automatically—no need to press enter. You can easily share your search query or results with a teammate by sending them the specific url to your search results.
💡To use the search function, make sure no filters or segments are applied.
We know research rarely goes as planned, and are here to support with more flexible options. With flexible incentives, researchers can adjust incentives after launching a project, or offer participants bonuses—without contacting our support team. You can adjust the incentive amount for your entire project or for an individual participant, depending on your use case.
For example, if you’re not getting the number of applications you need, you can learn and adjust as you go by increasing the incentive amount to attract more candidates. Maybe you 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. Or, maybe you accidentally put in an incorrect amount, or have changes in client requirements or company policy.
You can edit an incentive for a project from the Project overview page. Within “Session details,” you can specify the incentive by entering an amount. Note that when you modify the incentive, it will only apply to new applicants for the project.
You can edit an incentive for an individual participant from the Confirmed sessions page (moderated studies) or Participant tracking page (unmoderated studies). Read about more specific guidelines to keep in mind when adjusting incentives.
We also rolled out some updates to your Project cost view to support this change and provide more clarity into costs incurred as your project runs—check out our support article for more details, or reach out to projects@userinterviews.com for support.
Upgrades to participant profiles part two, addressing a common request from you all: Hub researchers can now see post-session notes on participant profiles! When you mark a session complete, you now have the option to add a note about a participant. You can view notes left by anyone on your team, under the "Project History" tab of a participant’s profile. We’ve also backfilled all past session notes so you can easily access all the data you need.
Participant profiles have been updated across User Interviews, with a fresh new design! Our new slide out profiles make it easy to view participant data wherever you are in your project workflow. These profiles are universal across the Hub table, project workspace (Hub & Recruit), and participant tracking tab (for unmoderated projects) for a consistent experience across all your projects.
You’ll be able to see a snapshot of activity stats, responses to screener questions, and for Hub projects, a full history of participation that you can drill into for session and screener details. The profiles can be expanded to full screen, and you can use arrow keys to quickly navigate between profiles. Learn more about the updates in our support guide.
And, coming very soon—to further support decision making as you and your teams recruit participants, we’re bringing feedback and custom notes left by your teammates into the profile view. Stay tuned!
If you’re an admin, you can now send emails to segments of your Hub panel, without needing to create a project! After a study, we know there are instances where you may want to continue communicating with participants—maybe to share project outcomes, provide an update on a feature, or simply to close the loop on a completed study. These can all be important ways to help participants see the value of their feedback and keep them engaged for future studies.
Note: This feature is currently in a limited release, so you may not have access to it just yet—stay tuned for updates on the full release.
To send a Hub email, simply select which participants you would like to send an email to, click on the Bulk actions dropdown, and click “Compose email.” You’ll be able to select a sender profile and use basic formatting and customization to build your message, and we will automatically apply the default email theme found in your team settings. Since these emails are built for communication outside of research projects, we encourage sending out broader updates or initiatives. Learn more about how and when to send bulk emails to keep your Hub panel engaged.
💡Note that only admin users (org admins and team admins) have the ability to send these Hub emails, to ensure teams don’t mistakenly message or over communicate with their panel. If your team is not using roles, everyone is an admin by default. Check out our FAQ to learn more.
Researchers can now use Zapier’s workflow automations to send data from over 5,000 tools to Research Hub. The best part? No code necessary. Connect your favorite CRM and productivity tools to automatically add, update, or delete participant records in Hub. Our Zapier integration is a great option for teams who are looking to move fast and already use Zapier in their organization, and who may not have the technical resources to build a custom integration with our Hub API.
The Zapier integration is available to teams on Custom, Premium, and Enterprise Hub subscriptions. Learn more about the integration and apply to join the program!
Looking for other ways to build with the API? You can build custom integrations on top of our platform, or else use Census to connect your data warehouse to Hub.
Templates make it easy to surface projects that have already been configured with your team’s preferred settings, and can serve as a useful starting point for newer users. Instead of repeating workflows, your entire team can leverage project templates and get up and running faster.
You can create as many templates as you need to meet the needs of all the different kinds of studies your team regularly runs.
Get started with templates from the project dashboard:
Who can use templates?
If your team is not using roles, any user can mark and unmark projects as a template. Learn more about setting up roles in our support guide.
First, we reorganized your participant tracking dashboard into a funnel view so you can see participants by their status (approved, started, submitted, completed, removed).
Then, we added bulk actions, so you can message whole cohorts of participants, mark their tasks complete, and pay out incentives en masse.
Next, stay tuned for visual project snapshots (dropping next week!). Designed as a progress bar, the snapshot shows how many responses you’ve collected so far so you can quickly understand the health of your project. You can then edit the task deadline and target number of participants directly from this page.
Taken together, these three updates make progress tracking simple—even for usability tests with hundreds of participants, or surveys with thousands of respondents.
We know many of you have followed along since the early days of the alpha, and are thrilled to announce that the Research Hub API is officially in beta! We’re excited for more of you to start connecting your tools and data sources, so you can benefit from fresh user data being automatically piped into Hub.
Whether your company stores user data in CRMs, data warehouses, or analytics tools (or likely, all of the above), you can now easily tap into those sources for all of your research recruitment needs:
There are multiple ways to build with the API, depending on your team’s data infrastructure and resourcing. Build custom integrations on top of our platform, or else use Census (and soon Zapier!) to connect your data warehouse to Hub.
The beta program is open to teams on a Hub Enterprise, Premium, or Custom plan. Learn more about the Hub API and apply to join the program!
We’ve made some major improvements to the rescheduling flow to save you time when it comes to coordinating participant schedules. Participants who were marked as “Did not show” for a study can now be rescheduled directly by the researcher—no need to route through our Operations team. To reschedule a participant, navigate to your “Confirmed sessions” page. When you click “Reschedule”, you’ll see time slot options to reschedule the participant, or an option to unschedule the participant and notify them to pick a new time.
And some more good news: researchers can now allow participants to reschedule their own sessions. You can find this option in the Project Builder under the “Scheduling” section. If enabled, participants will be able to reschedule to a new time slot on their own, releasing their original time slot for someone else to sign up—all with no action needed from the researcher. Rescheduled sessions will respect your minimum rescheduling notice and you can disable participant rescheduling at any time, offering maximum flexibility for whatever your study needs.
Look out for an exciting update to your project dashboard—to help bring greater visibility into a team’s overall research activity, we’ve added project counts and status filters. Across the top of the dashboard, you can now view your projects by status (All, Drafts, Active, Pending close, and Completed) as well as view the number of projects in each.
Click the "Filters" button for additional options. Filter the dashboard to show projects by access type (My projects, Shared with me, Team projects), or by product type (Hub or Recruit).
These updates are available for all users, but we know this especially important for admins, who may be managing a high volume of projects for their team. The improved visibility will help admins get a quick insight into what work is happening so they can focus on projects where their support is most helpful—for example, active projects, or those from a particular researcher.
Segments have arrived to your Hub panel! Quickly pinpoint the right users for your research, and easily retarget them for future studies. Set up is easy—use filters to narrow in on participants who meet your study criteria, save that custom group as a segment, and now it can be reused by you or any member of your team.
Previously known as “saved filters,” segments are simply custom groups of participants in your Hub panel. Don’t worry, your saved filters haven’t gone anywhere—all of your saved filter data has been ported over and now appears as segments in the left panel.
There are two ways to create a segment:
Segments can be renamed, edited, duplicated, and/or deleted at any time, easily adjusted when your targeting needs change. For example, if you set up a new opt-in method, launch a new project, or simply want to widen your scope. They are also dynamic, meaning they will automatically add or remove participants based on your filter criteria and any changes in participant data. Visit our support page for more details.
Segments can be used in a variety of ways, but some popular use cases include:
Segments are available on all Hub plans, to Team Admin and Researcher roles (the Teammate role cannot view the Hub panel). They exist at the team level and are viewable by everyone on the team.
Some behind the scenes work for us this quarter was focused on improving the experience for researchers running larger scale unmoderated projects. We’re happy to report speedier performance on two major pages in this workflow—up to a 40% reduction in load times for the Participant workspace page, and 90% reduction for the Messaging page.
Team admins now have the ability to deactivate and reactivate team members on the Team Members page. In scenarios where people have left a team, admins can now deactivate those users so they can no longer login and access team data. Or, in cases where users rejoined a team or were accidentally deactivated, admins have the ability to reactivate them.
This feature is available to admins in any team using roles—learn more about our Team Admin, Researcher, and Teammate roles in our support guide.
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