Closing Out a Project Successfully

Closing out a project is more than just wrapping up loose ends—it’s an opportunity to ensure participants receive a smooth, respectful experience, your data is complete and exportable, and your team walks away with learning that makes the next study even better. A thoughtful closeout process helps maintain participant trust, keeps your internal records clean, and sets you up for faster, more efficient project launches in the future.

This final lesson of Managing Live Projects walks step-by-step through the essential actions to take at the end of any User Interviews study, whether moderated or unmoderated, Recruit or Hub.

📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Manager, Kaylynn Knollmaier, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!

Finalizing participant statuses

As your study reaches its endpoint, one of the most important tasks is to finalize statuses for every participant. This ensures accurate incentive distribution, clean reporting, and clear documentation for your team.

End-of-study statuses include:

• Completed: Participant attended or submitted their task as expected
• No-show: Participant did not attend their session
• Canceled: Participant withdrew or was removed before participating
• Incomplete / Started but not submitted: Common in unmoderated work if a participant begins a task but doesn’t finish

Tips for finalizing participant statuses:

• For moderated studies, review session attendance directly on the session table before marking final statuses.
• For unmoderated studies, use the Participant Management page to see who started and submitted tasks. 
• If someone partially completes a multi-day study, mark them “Completed” only if they met your participation thresholds.

Once statuses are finalized, you’ll distribute incentives to participants who successfully completed the study. The process varies slightly depending on whether you’re using automatic or manual incentive distribution. Note that you cannot issue partial incentives for partial participation; participants will either receive the full amount or nothing. Multi-day projects also follow the one-payout rule: the incentive is released only once the entire study is marked as complete.

Exporting participant data

Many teams choose to export project data at the end of a study for analysis, incentive processing, reporting, or documentation.

How to export participant data

• Navigate to the Applicants tab of the Participant Management page
• Click Export Data in the top right corner (CSV format)
• Choose the statuses and participant ratings you’d like to export. 

CSV exports contain:

• Contact info
• Screener responses
• Session history and statuses
• Participant ratings and notes
• Completion timestamps
• For unmoderated studies: task progress status

Be sure to finalize all statuses before exporting for the cleanest dataset, and use consistent rating practices throughout the study so exports reflect your team’s understanding of participant quality. If analyzing performance across multiple phases or cohorts, tag participants during the study so those tags show in the export.

Post-project learning & team retros

Closing a project isn’t just administrative—it’s a chance to learn, improve, and replicate what worked. After closing your study, be sure to hold a short retro immediately after closing the project and reflect on things like:

• Recruitment speed: Did the project fill quickly or slowly?
• Drop-off patterns: Which segments had the most cancellations or no-shows?
• Screener effectiveness: Did your logic and questions produce high-quality applicants?
• Calendar insights: Were session times appropriately chosen and managed?

You can use features within UI to help you analyze your study performance:

• Review participant ratings to see trends in suitability or quality issues.
• Compare the “Applied → Approved → Completed” funnel drop-off in your data export.
• If using multi-phase or multi-day workflows, note which instructions or deadlines created confusion.

Closing out a project successfully ensures your participants are treated well, your data is export-ready, and your team walks away with learnings that accelerate future research. By finalizing statuses, distributing incentives properly, exporting clean datasets, and documenting takeaways, you create a repeatable, scalable workflow for future studies.

…

‍

Congratulations on completing the Managing Live Projects course! You’re now equipped with the knowledge and tools to confidently run recruiting projects end-to-end using User Interviews. Be sure to download the slides or take the course quiz to review your knowledge below.