Who is this article for?
🗣️ All researchers (both admins and users)
⭐ Recommended for all User Interviews plans
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.
How to view the participant tracking page and dashboard view
✅ View the participant tracking page
1. Open an active project and navigate to the Participant Management section.
2. Click on the “participant tracking” tab.
3. From there, you’ll see a progress bar which shows you the number of participants who’ve completed the task, as well as multiple tabs where you can see who’s approved but not yet started, started the task, completed the task, and been removed from the study.
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.
Approved
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:
- Participant name
- Date that the participant was approved
⚠️ 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.
Started
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:
- Participant name
- Date that the participant clicked on the task link
At this stage, researchers can click the checkbox next to any given participant or participants and:
- Mark a participant “Complete”
- Mark a participant “Incomplete”
- Message the participant
⚠️ 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.
Submitted response (for integrations only)
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:
- Tracking ID
- Submitted date
- Duration
- Link to the task
At this stage, researchers can:
- Mark a participant “Complete”
- Report a participant
- Remove a participant
⚠️ If a researcher is not using an integration, the participant will stay in the “Started” stage until they are marked “Completed” or “Removed”.
Completed study
These are participants who have completed the study. If using an integration, this view shows:
- Tracking ID
- Submitted date
- Status
- Duration
- Link to the task
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).
Removed from study
Participants in this view can have a variety of statuses, due to the reason they were removed. This view shows:
- Canceled - either the participant or researcher canceled once the participant was confirmed
- Incomplete - the participant was marked incomplete by the researcher for not completing the task
- Fraudulent - the researcher reported the participant to our support team for suspicious activity, and the participant was found to be fraudulent. Learn more about how we deter fraud in our support guide.
⚠️ 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.
Take action on a large number of participants with bulk actions
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.
How to use bulk actions
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.
Quickly understand the status of a project with the project snapshot
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:
- "Completed" responses indicated by the large black number
- Your target number of completed responses shown in gray
- The deadline for participants to submit their task
To quickly change your requested participant number or project deadline, click the “Edit” button.
