It’s here: today we launched a brand new, simplified project experience in User Interviews. ✨
We’ve redesigned the workspace from the ground up, guided by one goal above all: to make research fast, flexible, and intuitive for your entire team.
Explore the new experience 👉
This is the single largest product upgrade we’ve made in years. It improves the way teams design studies, launch recruits, manage participants, collaborate with teammates, and navigate through the entire process.
These changes are the culmination of six months of research and testing—from initial customer conversations, to developing our first prototypes and designs, to launching our beta and collecting real-time feedback from hundreds of teams.
Reimagining this workflow has been a fun, iterative journey. More importantly, it is a bold step up in the research experience—and we’re so excited to be unveiling it to every User Interviews customer today.
What you can expect from the new experience:
- Faster and easier research creation: The project setup experience has been redesigned. You’ll find it easier to edit and move through setup steps quickly, and newer researchers will find the overall experience more intuitive.
- Built-in collaboration from the start: Invite collaborators to be part of the research design process, leave comments or suggestions, and participate in sessions by configuring attendance rules. Or, set up and manage a project on behalf of a teammate while automating invites and scheduling.
- More visibility and control of the participant experience: When conducting research with your own users, you can edit and preview all of the communication your participants will receive. Select a template, customize touch points, and ensure your users will have a great experience contributing their insights.
- Easier to update projects as you learn: We’ve merged research creation and management into a single experience—it’s now easier to edit details of your study post-launch.
Demo the new experience
Try out the new workspace now ✨
Looking back
When we started User Interviews in 2015, we (Basel, Bob, and myself) experienced firsthand how difficult it was to source research participants. We soon discovered that participant recruitment was almost universally recognized as the biggest pain point amongst researchers—and we wanted to do something about it. For eight years, we’ve focused our efforts on making it easy and fast to get insights from the right participants.
Fast forward to 2024, and we’ve seen a lot of change in both our product and the research industry at large. Research teams are growing incredibly fast—LinkedIn cites “user researcher” as the 8th fastest growing job over the last 5 years. And on the User Interviews side, we’ve grown our panel to over 4 million participants, significantly reduced recruitment time (first qualified match under an hour and same-day matching for most segments), and evolved our product—for example, with the launch of Research Hub, to help teams build opt-in panels and manage research with their own user base.
Throughout this journey, we’ve learned that teams need the research process to be intuitive for beginners, and to flex up for more advanced research. There is a lot of room for growth here—indeed, our most recent State of User Research Report found that 97% of researchers cite recruitment as a major challenge. To support the needs of today’s customers, and to unlock some exciting future innovations, we’ve made a landmark investment to core workflows in our product.
Setting a vision
We began the process with generative research to envision what a “great research experience” could look like. We consistently heard that research teams need a process that is fast, flexible, collaborative, and predictable—four pillars which we used as a foundation to guide our vision of the new workspace.
As we beta tested with hundreds of customers, we were excited to see these same themes reflected back in user feedback.
Our beta customers have described the new workspace as “clean and sleek,” “simple,” and “self-explanatory”—“the interface is really intuitive, and everything is where you would expect it to be.”
They have also noted its impact on research velocity and teamwork—”it’s streamlined,” “it was so easy,” and “collaborative drafts worked great.”
This redesign also lays the groundwork for an exciting future for User Interviews. We now have a solid foundation upon which to build additional features and capabilities—such as template libraries to speed up research—and greater flexibility to recruit from multiple participant sources (e.g. Recruit and Hub) or combine research activities (e.g. a survey and moderated sessions) in a single project, to preview just a few ideas on the horizon.
What this means for UI (and for you!)
For years, we have helped teams reach their target audiences insanely quickly through our high quality panel, advanced targeting, and industry-low fraud rates. With this latest refresh, we’re excited to pair continued improvements in speed with a delightfully simple user experience.
We hope this continues to lower the barrier to conducting research, especially for those newer to the process.
And we continue to dream big when it comes to our vision for Research Hub—we’re making some big product investments to make the process of conducting research with your own users even more streamlined, especially for large enterprise teams that often struggle with customer recruiting.
Since day one our core belief has not changed: talking to users should be simple. Nearly a decade on, we remain dedicated to our mission to make connecting with participants so fast and easy that anyone can make research a habit.
To that end, we are committed to building processes and workflows that “just work” so that research and product teams can focus on uncovering user insights, and using them to deliver more value to their customers. We hope you join us as we build towards this vision—we’re just getting started!
