User interviews have always been one of the most trusted and powerful UX research methods. They give you something beyond dashboards or written surveys: real, in-depth conversations and context.

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But they’ve historically come with a cost – time, coordination, and a heavy lift to review recordings and turn videos into insights. Sometimes insights get buried. Recordings sit unused and research becomes challenging to revisit.

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In our recent webinar, we explored how that’s changing and how you can reduce the heavy lift of interview review, while building a research repository. 

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What is a research repository?

A research repository is a centralized system for storing, analyzing, and reusing research data, especially qualitative data like user interviews. It helps teams answer questions like what users said, what patterns emerged, and how past research can inform future decisions.
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For interviews, this means:

• Storing recordings and transcripts
• Organizing insights and themes
• Making research searchable
• Enabling teams to revisit past findings
• Supporting continuous discovery
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Optimal Interviews brings this to life by automatically capturing recordings, generating transcripts, structuring insights from the start, and making everything searchable so teams can easily revisit, build on, and continuously learn from their research.
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So what did we learn? Here are some key takeaways from this webinar, plus answers to the most common questions we heard.
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1. The biggest bottleneck isn’t conducting interviews. It’s everything surrounding it.

Running interviews isn’t just about talking to users. It’s everything before and after:

• Recruiting participants
• Coordinating calendars
• Managing reschedules and no-shows
• Setting up emails and reminders
• Transcribing, organizing, and synthesizing findings
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That overhead adds up quickly. There’s opportunity in automating these workflows and removing the friction around them. Optimal Interviews solves this by:
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• Creating a central calendar
• Emailing participants with confirmations and session reminders
• Automatically capturing recordings
• Generating transcripts
• Uploading and generating summaries and insights
• Structuring insights from the start
• Allowing you to explore instantly with AI Chat
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2. Speed matters more than ever (and it’s finally achievable)

Research isn’t slowing down. Product cycles are getting faster, and teams expect insights just as quickly.

What stood out most:

• Interviews can now go from recording → transcript → insights in minutes
• Teams can share highlight reels, clips and findings almost immediately
• Analysis can start while context is still fresh
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One team told us that a few years ago it took them three weeks to analyze user interviews for an initiative. When they replicated the same study in Optimal Interviews, they were able to generate usable insights in about five minutes.
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That shift from lagging insight to near real-time understanding is where the real impact lies.

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3. Scheduling should feel effortless

Interview scheduling sounds simple, but it’s often where things break down.
You can use Optimal Interviews to ensure:
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• Availability blocks with buffers
• Controlled rescheduling and cancellations
• Video conferencing integrations
• Support for collaborators
• Built-in, secure participant communication & messaging (coming soon)
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When done right, scheduling fades into the background so teams can focus on conversations, not coordination.
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4. AI is reshaping analysis but humans stay in control

AI is already proving its value in the analysis phase:

• Automatic transcription across multiple languages
• Theme and insight extraction across interviews
• Highlight reels and supporting evidence
• Natural language queries over your research
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But one point came through clearly: AI accelerates analysis but it doesn’t replace human judgment and sensitivity.
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Researchers still play a critical role in validating insights, interpreting nuance, and deciding what matters for the business. Think of AI as getting you to 80% faster, while you own the final 20%.

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5. The real unlock is continuous, reusable research

Here’s what you can achieve with Optimal Interviews:

• You can ask questions of past interviews using natural language
• Create new custom themes or topics on demand for AI to add new insights into
• Re-analyze old research with fresh context
• Add new interviews to your existing Optimal Interviews study and refresh the insights
• Identify gaps and spin up new studies faster
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This turns research from static storage into something dynamic, something you can continuously mine and build on.
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FAQs from the Webinar

Does the platform synthesize insights or just aggregate data?

Both. You can extract insights from individual interviews, but the real value often comes from patterns across multiple sessions. Aggregation helps surface stronger, more reliable themes, while still preserving standout moments from single participants.
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How is sensitive data handled?

Privacy is a core focus and consideration with Optimal Interviews. Some of the key protections include automatic redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) and enterprise-grade AI infrastructure with strict data isolation. We're also looking to expand Optimal Interviews anonymized scheduling and communication and manual redaction controls before analysis.
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What if I can’t connect my video conferencing tools?

Integrations are available for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. 

You can still run everything without integrations:

• Set availability without integrations
• Add conferencing links yourself
• Manage sessions independently
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Integrations are helpful but not required.
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Can I search across multiple studies?

Today, teams often bring relevant interviews into one project for analysis. Looking ahead, the goal is broader. Optimal’s looking into how the platform can search and query across all research, use AI chat to explore insights across studies, and surface insights at a Workspace level.
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Can I query transcripts or AI summaries?

Yes. You can search transcripts directly and use AI-powered chat to explore themes, generate summaries, or even turn findings into shareable outputs like Slack posts or reports.

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Final thought

Interviews aren’t new. But the way we run them and what we can get out of them is changing fast.

By removing operational overhead and reducing time to insight, teams can talk to users more often, share insights faster, and build a research repository that becomes part of everyday product decision-making.
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If you want to experience the full walkthrough, demo, and Q&A from the session, we encourage you to watch the full webinar.
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👉 You can watch the full training webinar here.

Since launching Optimal Interviews in December, we've been tracking closely as research, product, and design teams put it to the test. The tool is driving a real transformation in workflows, and we’re energized by the feedback so far.

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• “What took me manually 3 weeks to analyze 4 years ago, with the AI functionality, now took me less than 5 minutes. It’s crazy!”
• “This changes everything for how we work with interview data.”
• “The insights were spot on, and I was impressed by how well the tool understood the themes in the interview.”
• "I tried it for the first time this week. I was impressed by the amount of insights." 

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Optimal Interviews was built to remove the friction from one of research's most time-intensive steps: analyzing interview recordings. With automated transcription, AI-generated insights, highlight reels, summaries, and citations, the tool transforms hours of manual review into something that happens in minutes.

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But we’re not done yet. We’re constantly building and evolving based on your feedback. With the latest releases like automatic recording, every session can now be captured and stored automatically, helping teams build a centralized user research repository and supporting continuous research.

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Here’s a look at how teams are using Optimal Interviews, the latest work in this space, and where we’re headed.
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How Teams Are Using Optimal Interviews

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Researchers across industries are leveraging Optimal Interviews in a variety of ways. Here are just a few examples from current users:

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• Understanding customer interactions with voice assistants and AI to inform user experience and product development.
  
  
• Studying habits, purchasing patterns, and customer frustrations to optimize experiences and conversions.
  
  
• Evaluating how users navigate and interact with customer-facing websites to improve user experience.
  
  
• Gathering feedback from employees about internal tools and systems to improve workplace efficiency and satisfaction.

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Recent Enhancements: New Features for More Automation

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It’s been a busy few months, and we’ve shipped several meaningful updates over the past few months. Here’s what’s new:
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1. Multilanguage Support for Global Research

Optimal Interviews now supports 13 languages, automatically detecting and transcribing interviews in their original languages. AI Chat is also ready to assist your team in these languages, ensuring a seamless experience no matter what language your team is using.
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2. Video Conferencing Integrations

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‍Sync Optimal Interviews with your Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams account to automatically generate and attach meeting links to sessions scheduled with the Optimal scheduler.
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3. Automatic Recording

You can choose to automatically record and upload sessions scheduled through Optimal, eliminating the need for manual uploads. Sessions can now be captured and stored automatically, enabling teams to conduct continuous research. Accumulate insights over time in a central repository, where they remain always accessible and ready to be explored further with AI Chat.
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4. Custom Topics

Custom topics allow you to define specific areas of interest for AI to focus on for interview insights. As more recordings are added, the tool will automatically generate insights based on these topics, so you can easily filter and focus on the data that matters most to you.

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What’s Next for Optimal Interviews

Our ultimate goal? To keep finding ways to reduce manual effort. Let Optimal streamline your research workflow, automate time-consuming tasks, and help you build out your qualitative research repository.

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We have a number of significant additions in development, including:
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Calendar Integrations

Sync you and your team’s calendars (Google and Microsoft) with Optimal Interviews so you can easily schedule and sync you and your team’s interview availability. Avoid double booking and get scheduled sessions automatically added to your calendar.

Enhanced Privacy & Messaging System

Interviewers and participants will be able to message each other directly through Optimal. This helps protect personal contact details e.g. email addresses and reduces unintended bias, such as revealing the study creator’s organization. Teams can coordinate, add clarifications, and follow up more efficiently without exposing personal information.
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We'd Love to Hear From You

How are you using Optimal Interviews in your research? What's working well, and what would you like to see us build next?
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And if you're just getting started, our Interviews 101 guide is a great place to begin.

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Want to learn more about how to harness the full potential of Optimal Interviews and AI Chat? Register for this live training.
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Optimal Interviews is updated continuously and shaped with feedback from users. Follow our release notes or share your thoughts via live chat or feature request form to give your feedback and stay in the loop.

Collaboration tools like Mural, FigJam, and Miro are staples of how modern teams can brainstorm, map ideas, align on plans, and build together. But a canvas alone can't tell you if you're on the right track or guide you to what comes next when progress stalls. That's where Optimal AI Chat and user insights come in.

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By starting or bringing real user insights into the boards your team already works in, you can reduce ambiguity, ground discussions in real research, and accelerate decision-making. 

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Here are 7 ways to use AI Chat alongside your collaboration boards.

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1. Align on key objectives

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Before your next planning session, use Optimal AI Chat to surface relevant insights from your interview recordings. Add a summary directly into your Mural, Miro, or FigJam board so everyone comes in with the same context and understanding of the objectives. Instead of starting with assumptions, your team can start with real user insights and clear trade-offs to discuss.
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Try this prompt: "Summarize the key considerations for [decision topic] and flag any trade-offs we should discuss as a team."
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2. Create a user journey map

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AI Chat can analyze interview transcripts and video recordings and highlight common jobs to be done, behaviors, and friction points. You can then map those steps visually on your board and identify where the experience breaks down.
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Try these prompts: “Summarize the typical jobs to be done for the people we interviewed.”
“For this job you identified [paste job details], detail the journey steps.” 

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3. Turn pain points into design and product decisions

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AI Chat can analyze recurring themes from your interview recordings and convert them into concrete opportunities your team can explore next. Adding these to your board gives the team a clear starting point rather than a vague list of problems.
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Try this prompt:  "Based on these pain points [paste notes or themes], suggest three product improvements we could explore."

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4. Sharpen your marketing messaging

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Interview insights aren’t just valuable for product, research, and design teams. Marketing teams can also use AI Chat to quickly evaluate messaging, positioning, and customer perception.

When running preference or concept testing interviews, AI Chat can quickly analyze the feedback and suggest positioning directions you can workshop on your board.
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Try this prompt: “Suggest positioning options based on the interview feedback.”

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5. Facilitate workshops

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Running workshops and brainstorming sessions with cross-functional teams can be challenging. Conversations drift, discussions stall, and teams sometimes struggle to focus on the most important issues. 
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AI Chat can help you structure the conversation before the workshop even begins by generating discussion guides based on user insights from your interviews. Add the chat outputs directly to your board to guide the session.
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Try this prompt: “Generate a structured discussion guide based on the pain points of the interviewees.”


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6. Make brainstorming more focused

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Open brainstorming can be valuable. It can also be chaotic without clear direction. By leveraging AI Chat, you can guide your brainstorming sessions with intelligent suggestions, topic generation, and idea organization.
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Try this prompt: “Generate 10 brainstorm ideas based on these user insights and group them into themes we could explore.”

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7. Map complex processes

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Visualizing complex processes and systems is easier with tools like Miro, FigJam, and Mural. AI Chat can help you map out each step. AI Chat can help break down a process step-by-step, highlighting decisions, dependencies, and potential friction points based on your interviews. Your team can then map these steps visually and identify opportunities for improvement.
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Try this prompt: “Create a step-by-step process map for how users complete [task], including key decisions and potential friction points.”

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Using Optimal AI Chat for seamless collaboration

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The best collaboration happens when teams have the right information at the right time. 

Optimal AI Chat gives your team a jumpstart for your interview analysis: clearer inputs, faster synthesis, and smarter outputs that translate directly into what you're building on your boards.

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Whether you're running a workshop, mapping a user journey, or planning a product launch, AI Chat helps you spend less time getting oriented and more time making decisions.
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Ready to see what your team can do with it?
Learn more about best practices for AI Chat or book a demo. 

At Optimal, we know the reality of user research: you've just wrapped up a fantastic interview session, your head is buzzing with insights, and then... you're staring at hours of video footage that somehow needs to become actionable recommendations for your team.

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User interviews and usability sessions are treasure troves of insight, but the reality is reviewing hours of raw footage can be time-consuming, tedious, and easy to overlook important details. Too often, valuable user stories never make it past the recording stage.

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That's why we’re excited to announce the launch of Interviews, a brand-new tool that saves you time with AI and automation, turns real user moments into actionable recommendations, and provides the evidence you need to shape decisions, bring stakeholders on board, and inspire action.

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Interviews, Reimagined

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We surveyed more than 100 researchers, designers, and product managers, conducted discovery interviews, tested prototypes, and ran feedback sessions to help guide the discovery and development of Optimal Interviews.

The result? What once took hours of video review now takes minutes. With Interviews, you get:

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• Instant clarity: Upload your interviews and let AI automatically surface key themes, pain points, opportunities, and other key insights.
  
• Deeper exploration: Ask follow-up questions and anything with AI chat. Every insight comes with supporting video evidence, so you can back up recommendations with real user feedback.
  
• Automatic highlight reels: Generate clips and compilations that spotlight the takeaways that matter.
  
• Real user voices: Turn insight into impact with user feedback clips and videos. Share insights and download clips to drive product and stakeholder decisions.

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Groundbreaking AI at Your Service

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This tool is powered by AI designed for researchers, product owners, and designers. This isn’t just transcription or summarization, it’s intelligence tailored to surface the insights that matter most. It’s like having a personal AI research assistant, accelerating analysis and automating your workflow without compromising quality. No more endless footage scrolling.

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The AI used for Interviews as well as all other AI with Optimal is backed by AWS Amazon Bedrock, ensuring that your AI insights are supported with industry-leading protection and compliance.

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Evolving Optimal Interviews

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A big thank you to our early access users! Your feedback helped us focus on making Optimal Interviews even better. Here's what's new:

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• Speed and easy access to insights: More video clips, instant download, and bookmark options to make sharing findings faster than ever.
• Privacy: Disable video playback while still extracting insights from transcripts and get PII redaction for English audio alongside transcripts and insights.
• Trust: Our enhanced, best-in-class AI chat experience lets teams explore patterns and themes confidently.
• Expanded study capability: You can now upload up to 20 videos per Interviews study.

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What’s Next: The Future of Moderated Interviews in Optimal

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This new tool is just the beginning. Our vision is to help you manage the entire moderated interview process inside Optimal, from recruitment to scheduling to analysis and sharing.

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Here’s what’s coming:

• View your scheduled sessions directly within Optimal. Link up with your own calendar.
  
• Connect seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams.‍‍
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Imagine running your full end-to-end interview workflow, all in one platform. That’s where we’re heading, and Interviews is our first step.
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Ready to Explore?

Interviews is available now for our latest Optimal plans with study limits. Start transforming your footage into minutes of clarity and bring your users’ voices to the center of every decision. We can’t wait to see what you uncover.

‍Get started with Interviews.‍

The accuracy of your data collection is crucial in qualitative research. It is vital that nothing is lost in translation or simply missed from the point of collection to analysis, and our latest release makes this even easier to achieve. You can now directly import interview transcripts into Qualitative Insights (previously known as Reframer), allowing you and your team to capture and tag observations effortlessly while maintaining the integrity of the information. Get ready to experience a new level of efficiency in your qualitative research!

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The importance of transcription ✍🏽

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Whether you are conducting interviews alone or with the support of your team, it’s important to prioritize building connections with participants rather than struggling to take notes and ask the right questions. Transcripts ensure you avoid losing crucial insights and context as you move from data collection to analysis and reduce the likelihood of human errors and missed observations that sometimes occur during live note-taking sessions. 

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It also enables smooth collaboration among team members by allowing them to review interviews and contribute to the analysis, even if they weren't present.

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How to import a transcript to Qualitative Insights

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Watch the video 📽️ 👀

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You can add a transcript to a new or existing study in Qualitative Insights with just a few clicks. After recording an interview or user testing session, open your Qualitative Insights study and click ‘Sessions’ then ‘+ Transcript.’

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Add a session title, any session information or a link to the video for future reference in the session information box. If you have created segments, choose which ones apply to this participant; you can update these later at any time. Then click ‘import transcript.’

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Click ‘Select transcript’ and ensure you made any edits before importing it. This feature supports .vtt, .srt, or .txt files. Now, click Capture observations’ to complete the import and create and tag your observations.

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You will see your transcript displayed. If you use a .vtt or .srt file, you will see the speaker names have been identified. You can update the speaker names by clicking on configure speakers.

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How to create observations

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To create observations from your transcript, simply highlight text, enter a new tag or select an existing one, then click create an observation.

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There is no limit to how many transcripts you can import. This means you can import all your past and future interviews, ensuring all your research data is in one place for easy access and analysis.

Welcome to another UX New Zealand 2019 speaker interview. In the lead up to the conference (which is just around the corner!), we’re catching up with the people who’ll be sharing their stories with you in October.

Today, we chat to product design managers Sophie Taylor (ST) and Julie Jeon (JJ).

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me Sophie and Julie. Let’s start off with your history. How did you get started? What originally got you into product design?

JJ: It was a surprise! Throughout my time at university, I was gearing up to become a book/publication designer. After a sequence of unanticipated events, I found myself working at Trade Me on the mobile apps. I had a pretty solid plan around what I’d do after my studies at the time but it was the first unplanned decision I made, probably in my whole life, and I’m really glad I took this path. In hindsight, a lot of things I’d think about when designing a book (like how a reader would interact and navigate through the book and presenting the information clearly) were all very relevant to product design. I was also a big stats nerd during school, and I was happy I could revive that through the measure and learn approach you’d take working in product.

ST: My pathway to design was via some pretty nasty homemade cards. You know the ones; all three primary colors and too much glitter? As a kid, I couldn't get enough of the stuff, and despite the questionable taste of my creations, I was captivated by the process of making things. As I grew up this stuck with me. When I landed at university I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do and it was in the design department where I found I could learn about an endless range of topics while solving problems and making things. That in combination with a computer science paper landed me squarely in the digital world and that is where I have been ever since.

Can you speak to product design at Xero? How has it evolved in the time that you’ve been there? How do you see it changing?

ST and JJ: As the company has grown, so has the size and number of teams we are working with. Going from collaborating with a few people to a whole room of people has changed our approach. We’ve adapted and made new ways to share knowledge and work together as a bigger team, from plain old documentation, to sessions that focus on improving the design process and how to best work with development teams as designers.

Julie – You say you aspire to be a good coach to others. How does this manifest in your day-to-day?

JJ: For me, it’s been about spending time with people to encourage but mainly to listen. It goes for the talented and smart designers I’ve had the pleasure of working with, but also with the development teams and product people. I don’t think I approach people with an intent to ‘coach’ them, it’s more about working and getting better together as a team or discipline.

Julie – What are you passionate about outside of your day-to-day in product design?

JJ: In my spare time I exchange letters to my pen pals who are scattered all around the world from Tokyo, San Francisco to Toronto and more. It’s a privilege to be able to be a part of and get a glimpse into the various life stages that my friends are at. I’m also very much obsessed with my small indoor garden and making sure my kitten doesn’t eat any of it.

Sophie – Working at both TradeMe and Xero you’ve worked in two of the biggest tech companies in Wellington. How do they differ?

ST: I think the main thing is the subject matter, both were fascinating dives into domains with very different users. It was such an amazing opportunity at Trade Me to work on a local product that so many of our family and friends use and care about. At Xero it has been a real treat getting work on a global product and all of the challenges that come along with that.

Sophie – You’re a self-described tinkerer. What do you like to tinker with?

ST: I like a good project, anything from our vege garden, house renovations through to a fiber optic light dress my friend Lisa and I made for the LUX light festival a few years back.

What do you think is the single biggest challenge for multidisciplinary teams?

ST and JJ: Finding productive ways to solve problems together from start to finish is a big challenge which requires a lot of thinking ahead and preparation. But when it happens, it’s well worth the effort. Coming to agreement around what’s most valuable to solve first, making sure everyone is getting the opportunity to be part of the process to define the solution, deciding what to ship and evaluating if it actually solves the problem are some of the things that benefit from teams working together on. All of these steps need to be done in a way that’s right for the team to get the best outcome.

What do you think is the biggest mistake that organizations make when assembling multidisciplinary teams?

ST and JJ: It can be really difficult for a team if they don’t have a shared purpose. When a team is clear on the problem they are faced with, they can figure out a way to solve it that makes the best use of the strengths of the team, as well as the individuals within it. If a shared purpose is the foundation, a team with diverse perspectives ensures there are a wide range of ideas, approaches and risks identified during the process. This is more than just different disciplines too – this could be things like personality and working style as well as gender, age, and ethnicity.

Favorite thing about living in Wellington?

JJ: The easy access to nature is my favourite thing about Wellington. There’s always a hilly walk nearby, whether you’re in the city or out in the suburbs. I live near Wrights Hill out in Karori, so we’re always in the company of tūī and kākā out in our garden.

ST: Mine too! We are so lucky to live in a city where just down the road there are a number of beautiful walks to choose from. I am also a big fan of food and here in Wellington we are spoilt for choice.

Thanks for your time both, and see you at UXNZ!

UX New Zealand is just around the corner. Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned professional, you'll gain valuable insights and inspiration - and have fun along the way! Learn more on the UXNZ website.