Rosenverse

Participant Recruitment and Management Tools

Gold
Thursday, March 12, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Share the love for this talk
Participant Recruitment and Management Tools
Speakers: Kate Towsey , Basel Fakhoury , Oren Friedman and Graham Gardner
Link:

Summary

Explore the evolving world of participant recruitment and management tools at the UXR Tools Summit. Kate Towsey, author of Research That Scales and founder of the Cha Cha Club, will host leaders from UserTesting and RallyUXR who will outline their vision for connecting researchers with the right participants faster and more ethically. They’ll showcase innovative features that streamline screening, scheduling, and incentive management, and invite attendees into thoughtful discussion. Ideal for UX, design, and market researchers focused on improving research quality through smarter participant engagement and operational efficiency.

Key Insights

  • User Interviews focuses heavily on matching algorithms and fraud detection, using AI and LLMs to improve participant quality and reduce fraudulent activity.

  • AI is increasing demand for user research but also pressures research teams to move faster to keep up with rapid software development cycles.

  • Research infrastructure platforms like Rally provide a scalable participant CRM integrated deeply with organizations’ existing systems (Salesforce, Snowflake) and enable self-serve participant filtering through AI.

  • Democratization of user research means many stakeholders outside traditional research roles are conducting user interviews, increasing the risk of poor participant quality and research decisions.

  • The acquisition of User Interviews by UserTesting aims to unify participant networks and provide seamless experiences without losing tool integrations or openness.

  • Synthetic users or virtual personas are being explored mainly for training and early prototype testing, but real human participants remain essential for unique insights.

  • Research operations roles are shifting towards orchestrating broader data and AI-driven insights, not just conducting primary research.

  • Security and privacy remain critical concerns in leveraging AI with participant data, and strict governance and consent tracking are necessary.

  • Pacing in research is a key challenge: balancing fast delivery with quality insights requires thoughtful integration of AI and infrastructure.

  • Interoperability and APIs are crucial; modern research tooling must integrate smoothly with other platforms to meet diverse stakeholder needs and workflows.

Notable Quotes

"If research is going to slow down the product process, most companies will end up releasing those products without doing the research."

"Participants themselves need to be real humans at the end of the day to get unique insights."

"High-quality participants are the fuel that makes the whole research operation engine run smoothly."

"We’re not trying to change behavior, but help researchers in their existing processes to make research faster."

"Synthetic users might be okay for finding average behaviors, but they won’t replace unique insights from real users."

"Research is democratized: if you’re not democratizing, you probably don’t even realize everyone in your company is talking to users in different ways."

"As more software is being built for specific personas, precise participant targeting becomes more important over time."

"Building ecosystems of interconnected tools that work seamlessly is crucial for modern, fast-moving organizations."

"No matter what your contract says, once your data is in the cloud connected to an LLM, you have to accept the risk it could be exposed."

"Research’s role may shift to orchestrators of AI-synthesized insights and gap analyses rather than just primary data collectors."

Ask the Rosenbot
Kit Unger
Theme 2: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Christopher Geison
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Sean McKay
Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
William Newton
How to Lead With Data, and Without Data
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Ted Booth
Discussion
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Llewyn Paine
Coexisting with AI: A practical guide for researchers to navigate tools, ethics, and integration
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Noreen Whysel
Short Take #4: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Emily Danielson
“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Megan Blocker
Day 2 Theme Panel
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Amy Thibodeau
Opening Keynote: Process and Ambiguity
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Jen Briselli
Learning is the north star: service design for adaptive capacity
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Satyam Kantamneni
Do You Have an Experience Vision?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Brian T. O’Neill
Does Designing and Researching Data Products Powered by ML/AI and Analytics Call for New UX Methods?
2022 • QuantQual Interest Group

More Videos

Andreas Huebner

"Design and research at Compass have become so integrated that we become these powerful partners driving the product vision."

Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig Brookes

What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?

March 11, 2021

Frances Yllana

"Vibe coding and prototyping are communication tools to get everyone on the same page, not code to ship directly into production."

Frances Yllana Kaaren Hanson Husani Oakley Dan Olsen

DesignOps Exposed: What do our peers really think of us?

September 11, 2025

Aurobinda Pradhan

"Design managers need predictable roadmaps and healthy teams to meet project goals and timelines."

Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank Deshpande

Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts

September 9, 2022

Jess Greco

"Changing outcomes means changing incentives on all fronts to shift the culture effectively."

Jess Greco

Creating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity

June 8, 2022

Justin Entzminger

"Embedding community members to lead design sessions helps shift power dynamics and surfaces authentic voices."

Justin Entzminger Terrance Smith Tracy M. Colunga Mai-Ling Garcia

Risk and Reward: How to Diversify the Field of Civic Innovators and Designers

November 17, 2022

Jake Burghardt

"Contributors to insight summaries should get more value out of it than they put into it."

Jake Burghardt

Stop wasting research: Create new value with insight summaries

July 9, 2025

Neema Mahdavi

"No one just wakes up and decides to climb a mountain; every step is intentional and planned."

Neema Mahdavi

Operationalizing DesignOps

November 7, 2018

Catt Small

"Vision decks should be something that can be referenced time and time again, not just a binder on a shelf."

Catt Small

Moving from Execution to Strategy as a Designer

December 6, 2022

Michelle Morrison

"Design Ops’s mission is to take the pain out of the creative process and foster a culture that supports that."

Michelle Morrison

Culture Design

May 21, 2020