Qualtrics User Panel

Creating a participant recruiting system for a 5,000-person, 8-billion-dollar company

Project Overview

When I joined Qualtrics, the UX Research team had recently formed. Because the company began as a survey application for market researchers, the culture to be user-focused was already established, so my fellow researchers and I spent time educating designers, product managers, and engineers about what user experience research and methodology looks like.

One aspect of research the team desperately needed was a panel of users to draw from. With my knack in writing, I developed copy for a public-facing UX Research page on Qualtrics.com. I explained how a user panel works and identified several potential frequently-asked questions. I coordinated my efforts with the Marketing team to design and publish the page, and afterward, I went to work with my team to develop a recruiting survey. We mapped the survey questions and answers to the types of users we needed for research, but we also used the survey to garner initial product feedback.

I used Qualtrics’s XM Directory to set up and manage the panel, and with some brief training, the rest of the UX Research team was able to identify and connect with users for their studies.

Deliverables

Impact

The impact this recruiting system had on UX research at Qualtrics was enormous. Apart from connecting with customers via product managers, support representatives, and implementation specialists, there was no structured and routine way of recruiting users for research. With the new recruiting system, research got much faster, and with the additional implementation of in-product surveys, the panel grew even larger. By the time I left Qualtrics, the panel had grown to around 3,000 users.