"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 …

"The client doesn't care about your tools—they just care about the information."

“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.”

“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.”

“Mobile ethnography on the dscout platform allowed for tremendous depth of understanding about our users—more than any other project that I’ve worked on. We built relationships with our participants, and got prolonged exposure into their mental models, life situations and emotional journeys.”

"I hadn’t talked to potential customers yet and started to think, ‘Do people really use a changing table or do they just avoid it? Do they not even go into the store?"

"I think what was a big aha moment is just how much the research would impact our go-to-market strategy and marketing language. And we've used so much of the keywords from the word cloud in our language, whether that's the website, or our pitch decks."

“We had this observation that the technology was fairly complex and could only be totally understood by kids in the nine-to-ten-year age range. But that was also exactly when kids moved away from toys they played when they were younger. So we got to this conclusion in a week or …

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

“We've been able to take on 40% more studies. I don't even think I could put into words how much time Private Panels saved us. It's completely changed the game for us.”

“Participants are so much less self-conscious on dscout. They’re hanging out and talking to you, and they’re getting super real. My clients are amazed they can’t get over the fact that people will do this.”

“In beta tests, it’s important to identify patterns. But we want to understand what’s causing those patterns, and to understand if they’re problems. Capturing those candid moments that users spend with the product allows you to determine when to take action—that’s key.”

"Though we had a single learning goal, we still prioritized a mixed methods approach, a survey from research, and product analytics with data science. This enabled us to understand what was happening, by unpacking both behavioral and attitudinal data, the what, and beginning to understand the why. By combining research …

“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.”

“Many of our designers were getting frustrated that there was a lot of wear testing feedback coming through and a lot of changes being asked for in the product that we were creating, but they didn't necessarily know the reason behind that. The dscout platform really allowed us to change …