Tracking Participant Progress in Unmoderated Studies

Unmoderated projects can move quickly—participants complete tasks on their own time, with no live session to manage. That makes it especially important for researchers to keep a close eye on participant progress and step in early if submissions slow down, deadlines are slipping, or participant behavior looks off. The Participant Management page in User Interviews gives you a real-time, stage-by-stage view of how your study is progressing so you can take action efficiently and hit your completion goals.

In this lesson of Managing Live Projects, you’ll learn: 

• How to understand participant statuses
• How to keep an eye on your study progress using the Project Snapshot bar
• When to extend deadlines or increase your participant target number

If you're regularly running unmoderated studies, this is an essential course for you: Unmoderated Research with User Interviews.

📹 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!

Understanding participant statuses and the Project Snapshot bar

Once your unmoderated project is live, each participant will move through a clear set of stages. You can see these statuses in the Participant Management tab, where each row shows a participant and their current point in the workflow.

The progress stages include:

• Approved: You’ve reviewed their application and confirmed they’re a fit. They now receive instructions and can start the task.
• Started: The participant has opened the unmoderated task link—this is your earliest signal of real engagement. Note: If, say, 50 participants are approved but only a handful have “Started” within a day, it may indicate confusing instructions or a broken external link.
• 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:
• Completed: The participant has completed the task and submitted their materials (video, survey, prototype feedback, etc.) back into UI. You’ll see a timestamp for when they completed the task, and if you click on their name and go to the “task” tab, you’ll find links to their completed deliverables. 
• Removed: Here, you’ll find participants that were approved and later removed from the study for whatever reason. 

How the Project Snapshot bar works

At the top of the Participant Management page, the Project Snapshot bar provides an at-a-glance summary of study health. This progress bar tracks how close you are to your target number of responses.

In the snapshot 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

You’ll want to keep an eye on your Project Snapshot bar and look out for:

• If the completed count is far below target with little time left, you’ll want to take action by nudging existing participants or inviting new ones.
• If participants are starting but not submitting, you may need to revise instructions or follow up with reminders.
• If approved participants haven’t started, you may need to pull in more via the Applicant Pool or Hub invites.

When to extend deadlines or increase participant targets

Sometimes progress doesn’t match projections—this is normal. What matters is knowing when to intervene.

You may want to extend the task deadline if:

• Most participants have Started but haven’t finished.
• There were technical issues with your task link.
• You changed study instructions mid-stream.
• Holidays or weekends slowed progress.

Extending a deadline is quick and easy—simply update it in your project settings under the Research Activity tab, and participants are automatically notified.

You may want to increase your participant target when: 

• Submissions are too low despite high approval volume.
• You’re seeing a high number of low-quality or incomplete responses.
• You need more diversity in your data or want to broaden your sample.
• You want higher confidence in insights and need more total samples.

Increasing the target automatically reopens recruitment and reactivates your project in the marketplace.

Tracking participant progress is about staying proactive, using UI’s tools to monitor behavior, and making thoughtful, well-timed adjustments. When you use the Participant Management page and Snapshot bar effectively, you can quickly identify bottlenecks, maintain momentum, and deliver clean, high-quality datasets—without needing to babysit the project.

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