“It was exciting because the concepts that we came up with for accessibility limitations very clearly were concepts participants were excited about even those without accessibility limitations. And this makes sense conceptually, theoretically: Designing for accessibility and designing for edge cases means innovating for everyone.”

“We’d recruited scouts in the path of Hurricane Irma before it made landfall. We were simultaneously watching reports from scouts come in at the same time as we were seeing events unfold on the news.”

“It was exciting to watch all of the participant responses appear in real-time on the dscout dashboard. We collected tons of quotes, videos, and images that we later used to engage many stakeholders across the organization. It helped us understand our users and their needs.”

"The project started in December, which was holiday shopping season—it actually seemed like a perfect time to do a diary study and ask people about their shopping experiences, because people are doing a lot of online shopping during that time."

"I knew I had strong feelings after working on the team as a researcher for several years about where I wanted ReOps to focus its efforts, and I did not want to unintentionally interpret the diary study submissions through that lens. We are not a user research team of one …

“For me, dscout is the best research tool out there for doing app research, or for doing research on users of technology.”

"Instead of having simple well-crafted tools that can all work together, companies are incentivized to create big, bloated all-purpose mega-platforms."

"We chose a Diary study because we wanted to understand these folks over time, and we know everybody's day is a little different, but Mark and I really wanted to understand, "What are the highs and lows of working for a small business?" It was also important that we have …

“The treasure maps that the scouts submitted were amazing. They were so creative and rich that one of our designers made a Google Slides gallery of the different journeys so that the team could reference them as we were building our journey map, and we still have that as a …

"It was so cool to give personality to a start, especially when standing up a new offering or feature. We had the business case, and now we had the human case. There is certainly optimization that's based on our quant data, and now we're injecting the story to ensure we're …

“Co-creation is not just some creative, fuzzy, front-end thing. The dscout missions actually helped us determine one of the most fundamental, left-brain, engineering things: the dimensions of the phone.”

“We need to be in there, ensuring AI is continuously tweaked to account for potentially negative impacts and human unpredictability. That can only be done if humans are in there, testing and tweaking AI until it works for us. Working together, we can make quicker data-driven decisions and design services …

“The way we access our users greatly affects the methods that we use. I’ve worked in places where you could do guerrilla research and you can access people that use your product quickly.”

"It was really important to us that we have a diverse sample, diverse in a wide range of ways, and that our data has some real breadth to it. We also knew that we wanted to have really deep conversations with parents and be able to contextualize their approaches to …

"That makes clear what many of us already knew, that it's not about our screens, but what we do with them that matters. What we didn't know was how parents in the US today actually feel about navigating media with their children, and that's where dscout enters the picture."