Our mission
Back when we were a new company, we learned first-hand just how critical user research is (spoiler alert: we didn’t do enough research, and our first product was a flop!). To consistently build products and experiences that people love (or at least really need), you need to be in constant conversation with users, and you need to deliver insights from those conversations in time to impact product decisions.
Talking to hundreds of teams over the years has reinforced for us that the appetite for user insights is alive and well. Most modern product organizations agree on these points:
- They want to do more research
- They understand speed-to-insight matters
- They know good research starts with quality participants
So where’s the problem?
The problem we solve
Turns out, it’s really hard to find good participants to talk to. It’s even harder to find them quickly and reliably. And once you’ve found them, managing their participation in research can be full of friction for time-strapped researchers.
That’s where User Interviews comes in. We help teams discover and embrace user insights. Not just any insights, but targeted insights from the right people. We do this by connecting researchers to quality participants quickly, easily, and affordably. Eight years in, we’ve facilitated over 500,000 research sessions—and we’re just getting started.
Our focus area
We are 100% focused on simplifying participant recruitment. That’s all we do, and we do it better than any alternative method. We’re committed to making recruitment not just a little easier, but an order of magnitude better. We do this so teams can unlock powerful insights, even when operating in a climate of bandwidth constraints, budget scrutiny, and mounting pressure to show timely impact.
The status quo ways of recruiting participants have deeply under-served researchers:
- Agencies are slow and expensive
- Manual recruiting is time-consuming and unscalable
- All-in-one research platforms are low-quality, inflexible, and expensive
Recently, we’ve quantified the time and cost savings of User Interviews in our comparative report on the ROI of User Research and Recruiting Tools.
There are a handful of specialized research recruitment tools on the market, but User Interviews is the only one that offers participant recruitment and panel management, so you can seamlessly conduct research with anyone—real customers or lookalikes from our panel.
While we believe it should be so fast and easy to connect with participants that any team can make customer research a habit, our primary focus is to build solutions for teams that do frequent research and who therefore experience recruitment friction most acutely.
Our product promise
With User Interviews, it's simple to run high-quality research with your target audience. It's the only tool that lets you source, screen, track, and pay participants from your own panel, or from our 3-million-strong network.
User Interviews equips research teams with powerful abilities:
- Target users precisely, whether you're searching for a consumer audience, a professional niche, or segmenting your own customers for outreach
- Eliminate recruitment busywork so user insights are delivered in time to impact decision-making
- Stay coordinated as you scale with guardrails, admin controls, and endless customizations for mature research organizations
We offer two products that work independently, or even better together, depending on a team’s needs for recruiting customers and non-customers:
- Recruit provides on-demand access to our participant network with unbelievable speed and targeting capabilities.
- Research Hub is a CRM designed for teams that do a high volume of user research to build and manage their own panel of customers.
The research workflows we support
Recruit and Research Hub share workflows that make them easy to use in tandem. These workflows are built around four core needs that teams who do frequent research consistently have:
- Automating research recruitment
Our study automation tools help you screen, schedule, track, and incentivize research participants. We’ve layered on helpful collaboration features like a team-wide study dashboard, template libraries for studies, emails & screeners, and integrations with popular research tools.
- Finding targeted consumers or professionals
Our Recruit platform lets you source consumers by a wide range of demographic criteria and technical characteristics, or target professionals by job titles, seniority, skills and software, company size, industry, and additional custom requirements. You can also save lists of vetted participants to re-invite to future studies.
- Managing research with real customers at scale
Research Hub combines a database of users and a global record of research activity in a first-of-its-kind research CRM. Grow and manage your panel with dynamic segments, opt-in forms, invite rules, and an API for data integrations. Build customer trust with branding and customization for emails and forms, domains and sender profiles, and data consent notices.
- Enabling large research teams
For enterprise organizations where Research Ops is often tasked with supporting very large teams of researchers, we’ve built admin features to manage team roles and permissions, obscure PII, and set guardrails on customer communication. As you scale to thousands (or millions) of customer contacts, you can expand to multiple teams and panels, each with its own unique branding and customization.
We address these needs for user researchers, product squads, and the people who lead and enable those teams.
What we don’t do
We’ve come a long way in understanding the challenges researchers face, and we’re proud of the half a million high-quality customer conversations we’ve enabled.
Yet, we acknowledge there’s still work to be done before connecting with participants becomes so seamless that the user research habit truly takes hold in every organization.
Along this journey, we’ve intentionally chosen not to address certain parts of the research process so we can stay wholly focused on delivering on our promise. Most notably, we do not build tools for conducting research sessions or running user tests. There are hundreds of companies that are actively working on the testing tool layer of the research tech stack, and building increasingly sophisticated and specialized software to cater to the wide array of methodologies that modern research teams use.
Instead, we’ve always prided ourselves on being ecosystem players with an open and agnostic recruitment platform that offers universal compatibility with research methods and tools. This means that our customers have total flexibility in choosing the best way to answer their research question—interviews, usability testing, surveys, card sorts, click tests, focus groups, and so on.
To make it easy, we’ve built direct integrations with popular research tools that cover a range of methods:
- Video conferencing: Zoom, Google
- Surveys: Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Typeform
- Usability testing: Lookback, Sprig, Loop11
User Interviews is an unbundled research solution that plugs into any tool stack, and optimizes for flexibility, affordability, and best-in-class recruitment features.
What’s next
To our amazing customers who have helped to shape our journey so far and offered generous feedback every step of the way: thank you! Here are just a few things on the horizon for the next few months:
- Scheduling 2.0: a complete overhaul of our scheduling feature for moderated research
- Incentive flexibility: adjust incentives after launching a project, or offer participants bonuses
- Panel communication: send bulk emails to segments of your panel to update them on research initiatives
- Zapier integration: sync user data from 5,000+ tools to Research Hub—no code needed
- User Interviews panel report: detailed breakdowns of who, exactly, is in our panel and how we ensure participant quality
Follow along with our product release notes for the latest on what’s new at User Interviews.
