You’ve created an online study. Participants are starting to book sessions. They need Zoom meeting links. Now what? You jump tab to tab, tool to tool, creating and distributing links. Did you forget anyone when sending links? Did you accidentally send duplicates of any of the links? Did you send it in good time for the participant to receive it? DID the participant receive the link? Your collaborator needs to moderate this session using their Zoom—add a to-do to tell them to create a Zoom link using their account to send to the participant. But then the moderator is sick, and you need to update that session to a new moderator.
It should not be this stressful to get a Zoom meeting link generated and sent to someone. We agreed, and the Zoom + User Interviews integration was born.
Zoom + User Interviews is now included in all projects and plans. We hope it helps save you time and makes your research process simpler.
In this post we’re sharing the pain points we heard from you that helped shape our integration.
Manually generating unique Zoom links is a hassle
“It would be wonderful if a unique conference line/meeting link could be generated for each online session that is scheduled. It would remove one extra step of me having to manually generate all meeting links.”
Whether you’re using User Interviews to recruit or not, manually creating unique meeting links for each participant can be a pain. Even for a small study, you have to generate each link, and then make sure you record who gets what link so you’re not sending the same link to multiple people.
Given 57% of online studies on User Interviews were conducted on Zoom last year (the most of any tool), it was an obvious first meeting tool to integrate with so we could provide automatic generation of unique meeting links on our platform. Once your account is synced, you don’t have to worry about creating Zoom links for your study participants ever again.
Getting the link to the participant is error prone and unreliable
“I need to reach out to them manually before the session with this link. That adds time and creates room for user error on my part.”
This is where it gets tricky. You have a unique link, and now you have to get it to a specific participant. We saw researchers jumping through all sorts of hoops to make this happen—emailing participants, sending separate calendar invites including the link, messaging them using the UI messenger. For each confirmed session there was at least one additional step to get the link to the participant. A step to create a link, a step to send the link—the manual effort here really adds up. And consider that participants are receiving meeting links in multiple different ways study to study, which can be confusing and lead to someone missing the link. Not ideal.
When you sync your Zoom account, participants will automatically receive their Zoom meeting link in their confirmation and reminder emails. User Interviews participants know to look to those emails for all their study information, so this should cut down on the “where’s my link” confusion. No extra steps needed.
It’s difficult to coordinate who moderates which session
“A feature that would be incredibly helpful is an integration with Zoom so I don't need to coordinate in multiple places and then also coordinate with my research collaborators.”
35% projects on User Interviews have collaborators, meaning many researchers are working as a team. If you have teammates helping you moderate sessions, making sure all sessions have the correct moderator can be a mess of checking calendars and confirming availability. As a remote team that runs our own research sessions, we know firsthand that differing time zones and schedules can make splitting up sessions a challenge.
To make it easy, we created the role of default and session moderators so you can parse up sessions however works for your team. Any collaborator with a synced Zoom account can be the default moderator for a project or a session moderator. Set the default moderator at the project level, and any session without a session moderator automatically gets assigned to them.
Session moderators can be updated however and whenever you want—have someone take an interview here or there, split it up 50/50, you take morning interviews, they take afternoons. We list the moderator for each session in our day of session reminder email so the project owner and collaborators stay in the loop.
My calendar is my source of truth—my link needs to be there
“Now that I have my interviews scheduled, do I have to manually create a calendar event that includes the Zoom link... or is there a way to automatically do this?”
We live and breathe by our calendars. Especially if you have back-to-back sessions, you don’t want to go digging around for a link. You want to jump into the session, friction free. If you have your calendar synced with User Interviews, the Zoom link will show on the session’s calendar event. Participants will see the link in their calendar event as well, helping make joining a session simple for them as well.
If you’re new to User Interviews and cutting out manual steps to create and share Zoom meeting links with participants would aid your workflow, launch your first study study with us.
