Research Hub Part 4: Launching Your First Study

Who is this article for?
🗣️ All researchers (both admins and users)
⭐ All Research Hub plans

We’ve reached the most exciting part of our Research Hub onboarding journey: launching your first study! 

Every customer interview, usability test, or focus group you’re about to run needs a project to call home. Projects help you manage all the details and activity related to a specific research study.

In this guide, we’ll cover the step-by-step of how to launch a Research Hub project for optimal results.

How to launch your first study with Research Hub

💡 Note: Launching a project is easier if you first start by building your panel, organizing your panel, and customizing your Research Hub team settings.

How to launch a Hub project

1. Create a new project: Our project intuitive project workspace will walk you step-by-step through drafting your study.
2. Recruitment: Add participants to invite to your project by uploading a CSV or selecting users from your Hub panel. You can also wait until after you’ve launched your project to add participants. Optionally, add a screener survey to help filter participants or upload a document you need participants to sign.
3. Research activity: Add details about your study such as session location, session length, preparation instructions, and set up your scheduling and attendance rules. You can add collaborators during this step, or at any point during the project, and you can all sync your calendars to take advantage of automated scheduling.
4. Participant number and incentives: Fill in your target number of participants, incentive amount, and whether you’d like us to distribute incentives on your behalf.
5. Participant communications: Review all of the automated emails that will get sent during your project and apply email themes, template sets, and sender profiles for easy, on-brand communication.
6. Launch! You can continue to invite participants to your project, or go back and edit details about your project after it launches.

💡 Note: If this isn’t your team’s first project, you can also start by duplicating an existing project, or using one of your team’s saved templates.

Step 1: Create a new project

It takes just 5 clicks, or 10 seconds, to create a project template for your new study.

• Click on the “New project” button (the green button at the top right corner of the screen).
• Fill out your internal project title and an optional study description. You'll craft your participant-facing project title a a later step.
• Click “continue to project setup” to generate the project template.

💡  Learn more about the different study types you can run with User Interviews, and which choice may be best for your research goal.

Once you're in the project workspace, you can also add any collaborators who may want to review your draft project or join in on research sessions with you.

Step 2: Recruitment

Add participants now, or else leave this step for later:

• Add participants to invite to your project by uploading a CSV or selecting users from your Hub panel. 
• You can also wait until after you’ve finished setting up and launching your project to add participants.

💡 Learn more about the different methods of inviting participants to your study.

Build a screener survey—an optional, but recommended step:

• Screener surveys help you to narrow in on the target audience, and ensure you are capturing data to help you make optimal recruiting decisions for your study.
• You can reuse a screener from a previous project, or create a new one with different types of questions to cater for your various recruiting criteria. You can even apply skip logic, which changes the order of questions based on responses.

💡 Learn about best practices for building an effective screener survey, and applying skip logic to optimize the screener experience for participants.

Step 3: Research activity

Tell us a bit more about the research activity:

• Fill in details such as session location and session length.
• Add any preparation instructions for your participants.
• Tell us how you’d like to review participants—manually (for more control) or automatically (for greater speed)

Set up scheduling and attendance rules for you and any project collaborators:

• Customize scheduling rules and preferences such as minimum scheduling notice, and whether to enable participant re-scheduling.
• Assign roles for any project collaborators such as Moderator, Required, or Optional.
• If you and your teammates have connected your Google Calendar, you can all take advantage of our automated group scheduling feature which makes scheduling for teams much easier.

💡 Take advantage of our Google and Zoom integrations to make scheduling moderated interviews a snap.

Step 4: Participant number & incentives

Set up project incentives, if you choose to offer them: 

• Fill in your target number of participants.
• Set your incentive amount. If you’re not sure what incentives to offer, we have a handy incentive calculator where you can plug in key details about your study, and we’ll provide a data-backed recommendation. 
• Note that our incentives are flexible—you can edit them later for the whole project or for individual participants.

Select whether you’d like User Interviews to distribute incentives on your behalf (the easiest option) or whether you’d like to handle incentives manually. Learn more about your options for distributing incentives and the wide range of incentive types and currencies we offer.

Step 5. Participant communications

Write your project listing name and description:

• These will be seen by participants. You’ll want your study description to be engaging, but not give away too much detail such that participants will be able to bypass the rigor of your screener survey.

Customize your email settings to help you send effective invitations and communicate with your participants throughout the lifecycle of the study:

• All of the work you put into customizing Hub earlier on will come in handy, because you can pull from your preset sender profiles, email themes, and email template sets. 
• There are a lot of automated emails that get sent to participants in the course of a study — invitations, approvals, session confirmations, reminders, cancellations or reschedules, incentive redemption — so it’s best to have all of this squared away before launching your project. You can view and edit all of the project flow notifications from this page.
• One of the most important emails is the study invitation, which should clearly explain the what and the why of the research project, and persuade customers to sign up.

Step 6: Launch!

And that’s it for setup! Proceed to review and launch your project. You can continue to invite participants to your project, or go back and edit details about your project after it launches.

It’s time to invite participants!

Watch this short video to learn how to invite participants, and what to expect after launching your project.

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Inviting customers to your newly launched study is simple:

•  Go back to your Hub participant database, filter for your ideal profile, select all that apply, and invite them to the project.
• You can also upload a CSV of participants directly to the project, if you happen to have a curated list outside of your Hub database. 
• You’ll also be given a project invitation link which you can copy and paste into an email, message, or any form of communication you have with your users.

💡 Learn more about the different ways of inviting participants to Hub studies.

Once invitations have been sent, check out email metrics which give you visibility into email performance. You can trigger a resend or invite additional participants if you need to.

Soon, you’ll see applicants filtering into the participant workspace for you to review and approve. Throughout the recruiting process, we’ll automate all of your communications so you can focus on getting the research done. You can be assured that all participant activity will be tracked in Research Hub for you and your teammates to refer to in future.

Still need help? Here’s how to contact our support team

Remember, we’re here if you ever need help! Contact us by: 

• Using live chat in the app to get support from a project coordinator.
• Reaching out to your customer success manager if you’re on a subscription plan.
• Searching our support site to help resolve any issues you may encounter.

No matter how you choose to get in touch, we’re known for our speedy and exceptional customer service, so don’t be shy!

You’ve completed the Research Hub onboarding series

Congratulations on launching your first Research Hub project! We’ve come to the end of the onboarding series. You can continue learning with our Research Hub Best Practices guides.

📖 This guide is part of a 4-part onboarding series on getting started with Research Hub. Check out the other guides here: Get Started With Research Hub