Recollective 2023 Product Year in Review

For over a decade Recollective has been the leading platform for qualitative researchers offering the most comprehensive suite of asynchronous and live capabilities. In November, we launched our refreshed brand with the new tagline, "Research happy." This message encapsulates our core mission – to empower researchers to execute the research they love with the knowledge that they have the best partner and the best platform in Recollective. We’re welcoming a new era of Recollective, where the future is happy and you can do your research, your way.

Now that 2023 has come to a close, we’re reflecting on the transformations we’ve seen in our brand, our platform, our customers, and the research industry as a whole.

This year witnessed unparalleled advancements in technology, especially in artificial intelligence. As we integrated new technologies, we also focused on maintaining authentic responses, removing common research barriers, and supporting new methodologies. We've introduced solutions tailored to every stage of the research journey, ensuring you can pursue your passion for research without any compromises.

To wrap up this exciting year, we’re breaking down some of our latest improvements and innovations that are benefiting researchers every day in the Recollective platform.

Preparation and Setup

Between defining research objectives, developing proposals, getting approval on research design, and coordinating with research team members and other vendors, there’s little time to spare at the start of a project. We've streamlined the preparation and setup process to be faster and more efficient, so you can focus on everything other than software.

• Default privacy settings: New site-level privacy settings save you time when configuring projects by acting as the default for all new studies.
• Copy studies across time zones: Any existing study can be copied as a template for your next project. Now, a time zone selection made during the copy process can cascade to all activities and discussions within your new study space.
• Manage pending admins: Never get stuck waiting for a colleague to accept their invitation before configuring your study. Pending administrators can now be immediately configured within home page cards and subscribed to study notifications.

We've introduced new tasks and functionality to accommodate an even wider range of research methods so you can run your research your way without sacrificing authenticity in this new age of generative AI.

• Audio Response: We expanded the Multimedia Task to include audio-only recordings. Audio recordings provide valuable insights into participants' thoughts and emotions, capturing the richness of spoken communication and conveying nuances that can often be lost in writing. It also offers participants a natural and spontaneous way to provide candid feedback, leading to a deeper understanding of their experiences and opinions. (We hate to spoil the ending, but analyzing hours of recorded is a breeze with new, AI-powered summarization 👀 )
• Group Commentary: Sort and Rank tasks now support group-level commentary so you can capture the thought process behind why cards were grouped. It can also be used to facilitate open card sorting by having participants name the groups.
• Block pasting: To reduce the temptation by participants to use AI for their answers, we've implemented a feature that allows you to block participants from pasting external content into their task responses.
• Improved Preview Mode: We've made previewing a sequence of upcoming activities easier so you can always be confident that the flow of activities meets your expectations.

With improvements to our suite of synchronous tools, running live interviews and live focus groups as part of your research has never been easier.

• Flexible schedule: Our advanced meeting calendar component now offers greater flexibility when scheduling live interviews. Interviews can now be scheduled on any 15-minute increment while still respecting host availability and desired buffer times.
• Meeting Assistance: Backroom team members can now act as a “Meeting Assistant” to provide off-camera support in the front room, easing the demands on meeting hosts.
• Go live-only: With a new live activity-only license and study type, Recollective allows you to conduct synchronous research activities at a fraction of the cost.

Manage and Moderate at Scale

From effortless email management to real-time editing capabilities, we’re optimizing the Recollective experience for moderators so that you can focus on what matters: your research and insights.

• Communicate with ease: Resend invitations and other email communications in just a few clicks. Every email delivered can be reviewed and resent even after the user’s email has been updated.
• Adapt after launch: You are now able to make more changes to tasks after they have received responses. You no longer need to contact our support team for assistance with certain changes but we are always ready to help with our lightning fast responses.
• Remove unwanted content: You can easily remove incomplete or inauthentic responses in a study to ensure such data doesn’t skew final reports. When you remove a participant, you can choose to delete all their past contributions in a single step.

With per-project and annual licensing, Recollective is a research solution that scales to meet your needs. We’ve added new management options to ensure you feel confident that Recollective will scale as your business grows.

• Subscription reminders: Keeping track of software licenses on top of all your other project timelines is easier thanks to new in-app reminders.
• Limit profile fields: You can now control which profile fields appear in a study when re-engaging panelists across multiple projects. This ensures only relevant profile data is exposed in each study space.

The Segments area in Site Administration has a fresh new look with new tools to help you locate and manage thousands of segments with ease.

• Bulk Updates: Update the study visibility of multiple segments simultaneously. Whether you're handling long-term projects or juggling multiple studies, this feature ensures that managing visibility of segments is no longer a time-consuming task.
• Visibility filtering: Quickly find segments visible to specific studies with a new visibility filter. Each segment listed now highlights its visibility status so there’s no longer a need to click into a segment to find this information.
• Keyword filtering: Forget the CTRL+F workaround; instantly locate segments by name using the built-in search filter.

Data Analysis

We know that turnaround times are getting shorter and shorter across the industry. Supercharging analysis and making it easier for you to get the data you need into your report was a major focus in 2023. We’ve served up new and improved analysis and data exporting options.

• Bulk export chart data: It takes almost no time to export summary data for all charts while preserving your customizations. Use on-brand chart summary data to create visuals for your final report in just a few clicks.
• Translator transcripts: The audio channels for simultaneous translators are now included in live meeting transcripts.
• Demographics where they matter: Panelist profile fields now appear in all CSV exports alongside segment assignments.

It wouldn’t be a 2023 round-up if we didn’t mention our brand-new AI-powered features for analyzing recorded content!

• Accurate Transcripts: We've integrated the latest in AI technology to achieve industry-leading accuracy in its speech-to-text transcriptions. Customers can expect fewer transcription errors for all live meetings and asynchronously recorded audio, video and screen recordings.
• Hours of video summarized instantly: As a market researcher, you know that analyzing video content is a daunting task. Now, AI-powered summaries and key takeaways do the heavy lifting so you can quickly identify trends, commonalities, preferences, and challenges among your participants for live meeting recordings and asynchronous submissions (audio, video and screen recordings).

Data analysis will be receiving a major upgrade in early 2024, so stay tuned. Learn more about Recollective AI and how to gain early access to our latest AI features.

Security and Accessibility

We are committed to offering a secure and accessible user experience for researchers and participants alike. We upgraded our single sign-on (SSO) protocol to provide enhanced security while creating a more seamless experience for participants joining new studies.

We’ve also enhanced the overall accessibility of the platform. Colour contrast improvements and better keyboard navigation support are part of our ongoing effort to meet accessibility standards that make Recollective more inclusive.

That’s a Wrap

As we look ahead to 2024, our goal remains the same: to help you do the research you love without compromise. We can’t wait to deliver even more value to our researchers in the months to come.

From everyone at Recollective, we wish you a Happy New Year.

#researchhappy