Great Question UX Panel Guide

Free Guide: Panel Management

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Your panel isn't a community — it's infrastructure. This guide covers the real work of managing research participants: continuous recruitment, engagement without conditioning, clean data, and the KPIs that actually matter.

Free Guide

What's inside

Why "community" is the wrong frame for panels
A continuous recruitment model that actually scales
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ready-to-use 30-60-90 day implementation plan
Free Guide

Stop re-recruiting, start managing.

This guide is for you if you're managing a participant panel (or about to build one) and you've run into the same problems everyone does: recruitment that takes weeks, participants who go silent after two studies, or data quality you can't fully trust.

If you've ever Googled "how to keep research participants engaged" and gotten advice that boils down to "send a newsletter," this is the antidote.

"The automated summaries and chapters perfectly complement the already excellent transcripts. They save me time when checking how an interview went, or synthesizing my own studies. I’m also using Ask AI to query the wealth of our repository of studies conducted in the past couple of years."
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Olivier Thereaux
Director of Product Research
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Frequently asked questions

What is a research panel?
A research panel is a pre-recruited group of participants who have opted in to take part in ongoing studies. Unlike one-off recruitment — where you find new participants for every project — a panel gives your team a ready pool of people you can reach whenever a study comes up. Panels can be made up of your own customers, users, or external participants, depending on what kind of research you run.
What's the difference between a research panel and a research community?
A community is designed for ongoing engagement — discussions, forums, co-creation. A research panel is infrastructure for participant access. The guide covers why treating your panel like a community actually introduces conditioning bias: participants who engage too frequently start anticipating what you want to hear, which degrades data quality over time.
What should I look for in panel management software?
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Automated recruitment workflows: so your panel grows continuously without manual effort every time you need participants.
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Participant profiles with frequency controls: to track who's been contacted, when, and prevent over-participation that leads to conditioning bias.
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CRM integration: your panel should pull from your actual customer base, not live in a disconnected spreadsheet.
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Panel health analytics: specifically time-to-fill, response rate, churn, and participant diversity, tracked automatically instead of manually.
How do you recruit participants for a research panel?
The most effective approach is continuous recruitment from multiple channels — not a single big push. This means using CRM data to identify customers who match your research criteria, adding in-product intercepts that invite users to opt in, and routing relevant support interactions toward panel enrollment. The guide breaks down a specific multi-channel recruitment model you can implement in your first 30 days.
How often should research participants be contacted?
There's no universal number, but the guide recommends building frequency caps into your panel management process. Over-contacting leads to fatigue and conditioning bias — participants start pattern-matching your questions instead of giving fresh responses. Under-contacting leads to panel churn. The right cadence depends on your study volume, but the guide includes benchmarks for response rates and churn that help you calibrate.
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