Whether you’re running a usability test, mini assignment, or larger scale survey, monitoring the progress of your participants should be easy. We’re introducing some updates to make it easier for researchers to quickly understand how their unmoderated study is progressing, and to take action if needed.
Our participant tracking page houses all participant status updates, from the moment they are approved all the way through the completion of your project.
Located in the Participant Management section of an active unmoderated project, the dashboard view organizes participants into key stages, each displayed in a different tab across the top of the page. Simply click a tab to view participants in that stage. Let’s walk through what this workflow looks like.
After an unmoderated project has been set up, a researcher will start to approve participants to the study, inviting them to complete the task. Participants can be approved manually by the researcher or via auto-approve, and will start to populate in this stage as they are approved. This view shows:
⚠️ At this point, no action can be taken on individual participants. If a participant does not click the task link, they will remain in this stage.
Once a participant has decided they’d like to complete the study, they click the task link, starting the task. This will move them from the “Approved” stage to the “Started” stage.
This view shows:
At this stage, researchers can click the checkbox next to any given participant or participants and:
⚠️ The “started” status has replaced our previous “confirmed” status. This ensures a participant can no longer imply they will complete a task and then never start.
For non-integrated studies: Researchers must monitor responses and mark participants as complete as they finish the task (or as incomplete, reported, or removed). Participants will remain in the “Started” stage until you have marked their status. If you are not using an integration, we highly recommend that you collect data in your other tool to cross check a participant’s status for accuracy (for example, by name or email address).
For integrated studies: The integration will automatically track participant progress and move them to the next stage. Learn more about our integrations here.
These are participants who have submitted a response to your task. If your study is using an integration, this view shows all of the participant information pulled from the integrated tool or platform:
At this stage, researchers can:
⚠️ If a researcher is not using an integration, the participant will stay in the “Started” stage until they are marked “Completed” or “Removed”.
These are participants who have completed the study. If using an integration, this view shows:
At this point, participants have successfully completed the study and no further actions can be taken by the researcher.
⚠️ If the study is not using an integration, this view will only show the participant’s name, occupation (if applicable), and the date they were marked as “Marked Complete”. These researchers need to carefully monitor responses and mark participant attendance accordingly (complete, incomplete, reported, removed).
Participants in this view can have a variety of statuses, due to the reason they were removed. This view shows:
⚠️ The “Incomplete” status has replaced the “No show” status. Participants who are in the “Started” stage that never moved to the “Completed study” stage can now be marked as “Incomplete,” indicating they clicked the task link but never ended up completing the task.
Note: Participants cannot be marked “incomplete” until the session deadline has passed. We recommend setting your deadline early to give yourself some extra time to review responses and determine if you need to recruit more participants to your study.
We’ve added bulk actions to make it easier to take action on a large number of participants. We know this is especially important when managing large scale unmoderated projects, such as surveys, where the number of participants can grow to hundreds, or sometimes even thousands of respondents. Together with the new dashboard view, researchers can quickly move approved participants through the stages of a project, tracking their progress along the way.
If a particular stage allows bulk actions, a checkbox column will appear next to the participant name. When you select one or more participants, you will see action options appear at the bottom right corner of the dashboard, where you can choose to report, message, or mark participants as completed in bulk.
To help you understand the status of your project at a glance, we've added a Project Snapshot bar to the Participant Tracking page. This new progress bar tracks how close you are to your target number of responses.
In the progress bar, you'll find:
To quickly change your requested participant number or project deadline, click the “Edit” button.