Lesson
5

Launching Your First Project

8mins to complete

Once you’ve set up the basics like payment methods and permissions, you’re ready to jump right into recruiting using Research Hub’s out-of-the-box workflow features. 

In this lesson of our Hub for ReOps: Set Up and Onboarding course, we’ll show you how to launch your first project with User Interviews, from creating a screener survey to distributing incentives. 

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

How to launch a project in Research Hub

1. On the main project page, click “create a new project” to launch a project. 

A pop-up will ask you to give your project a name and an optional description. These are internally-facing details, so choose a name that will make the most sense for you and your team. Then, click “Create project.”

2. Set up your screening and approval process in the “Recruitment” tab of the “Research Design” section.

In the Recruitment tab, you’ll need to fill out details for:

  • Participant source: If you’re launching a Hub project, you’ll select “Your own users and panel.” Then, click “add” to upload a CSV of participants to invite to this project. Later on, we’ll show you how to build your panel so you can recruit directly from Hub.
  • Screener survey: Screener surveys help you filter through qualified and unqualified applicants to your study. You can choose from multiple question types, use skip logic to streamline the survey-taking process for participants, and select which questions are required to streamline the screening process.
  • Documents: If you have NDAs, consent forms, or other documents that participants will need to sign, you can upload them here. Note that Document Signing is an optional feature, which may or may not be included in your subscription plan. 
  • Review and approval: Choose whether to manually review and approve applications that come through, or automatically invite participants to choose a time slot if their screener criteria is a good match. 

⭐ A note on inviting participants to projects: We recently launched controlled invites, which gives you more control over who you invite to a project, when, and how:

  • Select participants from your Hub panel or upload a CSV
  • Create a shortlist of participants from as many sources (Hub or CSV), as many times as you want
  • Invite a subset of participants from your list to invite to the project — or launch without sending invites at all

3. Fill out the session details in the “Research Activity” tab.

In this tab, you’ll need to select the details for:

  • Type of research: UI supports recruiting for moderated, unmoderated, and multi-day studies. If you’re not sure what kind of research to do, try our UX Research Method Selection Tool
  • Session location and length: You can conduct sessions in person, remotely over the phone, or via a video conferencing tool—or you can have participants complete an unmoderated task. Add session/task links automatically using our integrations
  • Scheduling: Add available time slots for approved participants to choose from for sessions. You can also add optional or required attendees, share a video conferencing or unmoderated task link, and set scheduling rules to prevent overscheduling. With our calendar integrations, you can set up automatic scheduling for yourself and your team. 
  • Preparation instructions: Here, you’ll include any relevant info participants may need to prepare for the session—including specific context, devices needed, or whether or not the session will be recorded. 

4. Select your participant number, incentive amount, and incentive distribution method. 

In the “Participant Number & Incentives” tab, set:

  • The number of participants you’re looking to recruit
  • The incentive amount
  • The incentive distribution method

Automatic distribution is the best option for handling incentives. When UI distributes incentives for you, it makes it easy to reward participants in over 200 countries with 1,000+ global reward options and automatic currency conversion. However, if you prefer to handle incentives on your own (or not offer a payment at all), that’s an option too. 

If you’re uncertain about what the right incentive amount would be, you can enter your study details into our Incentive Calculator and get a personalized, data-backed recommendation. 

5. Edit your participant-facing project details and email notifications in the “Participant Communications” tab.

In the last tab of the project builder, you can enter the project title and description. These details will be included in your invitation email and participant application screens, so make them clear and catchy without giving away too much information about the types of participants you’re looking for. 

From this tab, you can also:

  • Choose your sender profile, email theme, and email template set. In Lesson #4, you learned how to customize your themes and set up templates—all that effort is going to come in handy here. 
  • Edit all project flow notification emails.
  • Send yourself a preview of each email to see how they’ll appear to participants.

6. Click “launch” to go live with your recruitment project and use our participant management tools to streamline communication, scheduling, and incentives distribution.

Once you’ve filled out all the details in the “Research Design” section, you’re ready to launch! Click “launch” in the upper right corner. When you start receiving applications, you can move onto the “Participant Management” section to approve applicants, track and manage sessions, and communicate with participants.

Some tips to note when managing live projects: 

  • From the “Invited” tab of the “Participant Management” section, you can keep track of your project invitation email metrics to understand how participants are engaging with your invites. If you need to, you can invite more participants by selecting them from Research Hub, uploading a CSV, or sharing a project link.
  • From the “Applicants” tab, you can approve qualified applicants, update participant ratings after sessions, and take bulk actions like marking sessions complete or bulk messaging participants
  • In the “Sessions” tab, you can view and manage your confirmed sessions, mark participants as “complete” or “did not show” (note that UI will never charge you for a no-show—learn how to replace a no-show here), or edit the incentive amount for a specific participant. 

Now that you’ve launched your first project, you’ll start seeing the real value of Hub within days. Happy researching!

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