ethnio

I have been using ethnio for over 5 years, with thousands of studies and hundreds of different projects for the No. 1 Latin American e-commerce marketplace and fintech, with 300 MM users and 18 countries. Ethnio is a game-changer if you need to grow and mature your UX research practice.

In short:

• It saves time.
• It integrates well, both visually and with our data, enhancing the end-user UX.
• It covers all the needs for participant recruitment -even those we didn't know we had.
• Their support team works close to us, and is willing to incorporate our feedback.

In longer form:

It saves us time. Before using ethnio, our team took from 1.5 to 2.5 days to recruit participants for in-person or remote studies. Now we can have in-person participants with less than 2 hours of work, and can have a remote study running in about 30 to 45 minutes. It integrates well, both visually and with our data, enhancing the end-user UX. Ethnio lets us intercept and recruit real users doing real activities on our website and app, in a way that feels natural to them, and well-integrated to our brand and visuals. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference it makes to have this quality of participants over traditional recruitment methods, like panels and e-mail. It is also very easy to integrate the user and session information to minimize the number of questions we need to screen participants. E.g. phone OS, number of purchases, which we could then use to only schedule android participants with little experience in buying goods with us. It covers all the needs for participant recruitment -even those we didn't know we had. Since ethnio is a dedicated recruitment tool made by and for UX researchers, it embodies the knowledge of your current AND future needs. For example, at one point we needed to start scheduling users automatically –since it was taking a lot of time–, and ethnio already had that feature, even integrated with google calendar. Their support team works close to us, and is willing to incorporate our feedback. Even though there weren't many situations in which we needed support, the few were good experiences. It felt very much like working with a teammate than with a vendor. Also of note, we've seen many of our suggestions for features and UX enhancements implemented shortly after. One tradeoff: investing some time in learning is a "fair price" to master any power tool. I wouldn't expect to install photoshop and master it in an hour, for example. Nonetheless, we could be up and running on the first day, and then we learned most of the features and integrations in the first month.

To sum it up:

We take less time recruiting and more time researching. The reason this has proved game-changing is that accelerating recruitment also accelerated ALL of the other research processes, which in turn resulted in:

• The mitigation of the "we don't have time to research" frictions.
• An increase in our ability to get buy-in from teams and senior management.
• A vast enhancement in the quality of our research, thanks to the time we didn't spend in recruiting