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Gathering qualitative insights takes too long, and it doesn’t have to be that way

Fast access to quality research participants is the missing key to better decision making and business growth.

You can’t truly understand your users without qualitative insights. 

Imagine watching what someone does, but never talking with them. Would you really understand that person’s motivations, needs, and fears? Of course not—you could only make guesses based on observation and your own (inherently biased) experience. Nobody wants that kind of relationship with their customers. But without quick and easy access to qualitative insights, many teams are left with no choice. 

Yes, companies are smarter than they’ve ever been. They’re gluttons for data, using analytics tools to track every interaction in their product. But even with this data, best-in-breed companies still make mistakes. They still spend billions of dollars developing failed products. They still have deep misunderstandings about their customers. They’re often still guessing when they make decisions.

Why? Talking to users, listening to their experiences, and gathering qualitative insights takes too long and is difficult to scale.

What analytics alone can’t tell you 

That’s not to say that businesses aren’t trying to understand their users. They’re spending billions of dollars on cutting analytics tools. Yet most analytics tools focus on helping companies watch what their users do. There hasn’t been the analogous innovation in helping companies listen to what their users tell them. 

This limitation means there is a whole set of questions companies cannot answer. Questions such as: 

  • What are your biggest pain points?
  • How is your team organized?
  • What would make your day-to-day better?
  • Why did you choose to go with a competitor?
  • Why aren’t you using this feature that we assumed you’d love?

Companies need qualitative insights to answer those questions. 

The current state of qualitative user research

Unfortunately, getting qualitative insights takes a long time—too long for many companies, which is why so many teams are unable to integrate qualitative insights into their decision making and product development.

Imagine if analytics teams had to go to an outside vendor and wait weeks before getting their datasets. Companies wouldn’t be able to be as data-driven. They’d have to move slow or fly blind. That scenario feels absurd in the context of product  analytics—but that’s exactly the current state of qualitative insights. 

Finding UXR participants should be fast and easy

For qualitative insights to be valuable, companies need to be able to discover and process them quickly. If it takes too long to get those insights they’re useless—companies will make their decisions in the interim without them.They’ll guess. Many times, they’ll guess wrong.

User Interviews is solving this problem. 

We believe (and more importantly, users have told us) that fast access to quality participants has been the biggest hurdle preventing companies from doing critical user research, from getting qualitative insights when they need them. So we started by solving an acute pain point—finding quality participants fast. 

There’s still more to do. At User Interviews, the whole team is laser-focused on finding and removing friction points within the UX research workflow, so companies can have instant access to qualitative insights. For instance, we recently launched a Zoom + User Interviews integration to streamline your workflow and make generating research session  links so much simpler. And just last week we announced Document Signing, a feature that lets you automate signature collection for NDAs and release forms. 

As we continue to solve this problem, we believe that qualitative insights will become a new data layer for companies—one that can be easily, quickly, and fully integrated into all of their decision making. 

🏃 6 Strategies for Doing Faster User Research—Without Sacrificing Validity

The fastest way to recruit research participants

Start making better product decisions with seamless access to quality, vetted participants. Give User Interviews a try—your first three participants are free!

Basel Fakhoury
CEO & Co-Founder

Basel Fakhoury is a co-founder and the CEO of User Interviews. Sometimes he writes things, too.

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