This customer story was originally published on Hotjar.com and reflects the customer’s experience with its product offering. Following Hotjar's integration under the Contentsquare legal group, this customer story has been migrated to this site [Contentsquare.com] as part of our unified content experience.
UX studio is a strategic UI/UX design and research consultancy running in-depth research initiatives to help clients optimize their product experience. As a key part of their services, the UX studio team conducts interviews and testing sessions with real people, using these insights to refine clients’ designs and provide personalized solutions.
UX studio 🤝 Hotjar by Contentsquare: a summary
UX studio’s requirements:
Faster recruitment
A global participant pool
More precise recruitment
Solving the issue:
After a few years of using Interviews (previously PingPong) ad-hoc, the UX studio team subscribed to the platform, making it their go-to tool for user interviews and testing
Outcomes and results:
Recruitment time decreased from 2–3 weeks to 1–2 days
Researchers could recruit a diverse range of participants from underrepresented locations
Interviews’s 200,000+ participant pool enabled the team to source people who fit highly specific profiles
The company
Founded in 2013, UX studio today employs a team of UI/UX designers and researchers serving clients like Netflix, Cisco, and HBO. Barbara Bicskei, a Studio Lead, and Zita Gombár, a UX Researcher, are two of the 30-plus UX studio team members who have made Interviews their go-to tool to run successful research projects.
A dedicated research arm for customer-obsessed businesses
UX studio researchers like Zita and Barbara are brought in to complete fixed-term research projects or support clients full-time for extended periods. This setup means long-term collaboration with every client—researchers participate in team meetings, work closely with design and product teams, and play the role of in-house UX expert for as long as clients need them.
At any given time, UX studio runs multiple research projects at every stage of product development for a diverse range of clients.
To run effective initiatives, the team requires participants for several types of user research projects, including
Discovery research and exploration
Prototype testing
Usability testing
UX audits
Concept testing
Diary studies
More research projects, more challenges
Before using Interviews, recruitment for each research project was manual and, depending on the target audience, lengthy. The UX studio team would search for participants via social media, advertising, and forums, and had the intention of building their own participant pool. But that goal proved easier said than done.
“We have different clients from different industries—we’re interviewing everyone from lawyers and PR professionals to football fans. Given the wide range of profiles we needed for the projects, we had to look for an alternative solution to help with recruitment,” Barbara explains.
As the business and its client base expanded, UX studio had three critical requirements:
🚀 Faster recruitment: manual participant recruitment on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit was time-consuming
🌍 A global participant pool: bigger clients meant bigger projects, and the team needed a recruitment solution for projects spanning several countries and languages
🪡 More precise recruitment: with more clients from B2B sectors, research needs were more specific, and recruiting the right participants became increasingly challenging
They could carry on as they were—or try something different. “In the end, it was easier to go with Interviews,” says Barbara.
Reducing a weeks-long recruitment process to one day
Recruitment for highly focused UX projects is a significant challenge for a UI/UX design and research consultancy like UX studio.
“It’s always very hard to recruit the right people, for example for a B2B product,” Zita explains. “I’ve tried methods like social media, forums, and ads. In previous projects, I’ve spent up to two weeks finding just a few applicants.”
Access to Interviews’s 200,000-strong participant pool has made recruitment easier and faster, immensely improving Zita’s day-to-day.
Interviews allows me to do my job—the research tasks—and not spend my time recruiting.Zita GombárUX Researcher
Interviews allows me to do my job—the research tasks—and not spend my time recruiting.
When the right participants for a particular project are available, “recruitment in Interviews takes just one or two days.”
Interviews’s automatic compensation has also proven convenient for researchers.
“When it comes to compensation, I don’t have to think about it,” says Zita. The ability to instantly adjust the compensation amount for each participant without needing to reach out to support is a crucial feature for UX studio.
Sourcing participants from a range of locales
UX studio supports businesses worldwide, so research projects often require participants outside the US and UK. One of the main reasons UX studio has happily stuck with Interviews for the past 3 years is the diversity of participants and locations.
Interviews is good for us because we have clients from different countries. Some regions are very difficult for recruitment, but with Interviews, we’ve found people everywhere, from Norway to Brazil to India.
When it’s time to review their tools and investigate potential alternatives, the UX studio team repeatedly runs into the same issue: most other user interview tools focus on English-speaking countries.
For a multi-country project, we had to run 40 interviews in a short amount of time. Without Interviews, doing it manually, it wouldn’t have been possible.
How Interviews supports UX studio’s internal product team
It’s not only UX studio’s researchers and clients benefiting from Interviews’s participant pool.
Aside from providing research and design services, UX studio builds three of its own products: Uxfol.io, Copyfol.io, and Archifol.io, portfolio-builder tools for different professions. UX studio’s internal product team also uses Interviews to improve the product experience of these tools.
Finding the right people for the right project
Since using Interviews, Zita has been completely satisfied with the platform’s ability to match her with the right participants regardless of industry, role, and seniority.
Working with a recent client in the legal field, she ran semi-regular recruitment rounds once or twice a month, requiring a different set of people for each. Interviews enabled her to recruit everyone from junior legal assistants to director-level professionals working at enormous law firms in highly specialized fields.
Even when we have a big range within a target profile, we're able to find the right people with Interviews.
Helping clients build better digital products with Interviews
Several projects ago, UX studio leveraged Interview’s participant pool to streamline and optimize a client’s payment process. The client was confident in its system and believed everything was functioning as it should.
The usability testing sessions revealed a host of technical issues within their existing payment process. Participants interacted with elements in unexpected ways, and encountered blockers when setting up two-factor authentication on mobile devices.
Barbara says it was incredibly revealing. “Because the testing required participants to leave the client’s desktop website and perform actions offline, like going on their mobiles and using their credit card, these sessions surfaced information the client could not have anticipated.”
These types of discoveries aren’t easy to come by, and they’re the reason so many businesses choose to partner with UX studio. They’re also the reason UX studio chooses to partner with Hotjar from Contentsquare.