Ethnio Reviews

Ethnio allows us to recruit, screen, house, and pay participants easily. The processes are easy to understand/learn, and the team is always helpful when we face a problem.

Our use case does not always require specific features, but Ethnio is very accommodating with tweaking things to fit our needs; i.e., matching the current workflow to our team's needs.

We recently needed a feature to be moved from one location, locked down to a few admins, to another page that is accessible by the majority of users; this increased the efficiency of recruitment and issuing payment to participants.

There are lots of things I like about Ethnio. I like how easy it is to send payment to recipients in various countries, and choose what type of payments they can receive, including charity donations. I like how all I have to do is upload emails, and the rest is already written (but editable if I need to customize anything). I like how easy it is to track the status of the payment, and provide reports to my finance team. On top of that, the support from Ethnio is always super fast and helpful.

The platform does have a bit of a learning curve, and has so much functionality that it can feel like a lot to figure out in the beginning. But not that everything is configured how we want it, I'm in and out within a minute whenever I send incentives.

As an international product and company, we have to send incentives worldwide, and Ethnio has made that very easy. It's also made it easy for us to track and audit how much we're sending.

I've worked with Ethnio for over three years, and I've constantly been impressed by their ability to listen and respond to our business priorities and our rapidly changing needs. Ethnio is always a willing partner who rolls up their sleeves to solve problems. Nate and Shirin are amazing, and make us feel like we are their most important client even though we know they have larger clients. We can come to them with problems, ideas, pain points and they are always willing to listen, brainstorm and problem solve!

There are no real flags that I have to call out about working with Ethnio. The only thing I've experienced is an issue on my side where my internal security team struggles with working with a smaller, more adaptable external partners.

Ethnio has helped us solve problems around incentivizing our research participants around the global. Ethnio has supported our large research panels which has hundreds of panelist around the globe in multiple languages. Ethnio enabled us to do research with those individuals where we would have otherwise not have.

Beyond that, Ethnio has worked with us on building out our research operations infrastructure from scheduling participants, participant database, internationalization of research and more! We started working with Ethnio due to its intercept platform but we've expanded into working with them and leveraging them for so much more!

Ethnio enables in-context remote research in your product, especially with high intent true users. It’s relatively easy to set up and can be leveraged for qual and quant data collection. Their access to help is amazing. I feel confident the team is there if I ever need support.

I’ve used Ethnio at two tech organizations (I brought the tool to one of them over four years ago) and was able to conduct studies that led to some eye opening findings. It made our team not only successful but also streamlined painful jobs like recruiting, scheduling, and paying incentives.

Ethnio has added many features over the last four years which means there is some learning curve to fully utilize them all.

Ethnio allows to recruit true, non-panel customers giving even more credibility to your findings. It saves a ton of time which is critical in typical work environment where people expect to get feedback and findings fast. It is also a very engaging tool so more stakeholders want to be part of your studies.

I like that I can quickly and easily get feedback from any customer, any brand. I like that I can quickly and easily recruit users for any study I'm running and even keep track of their information without asking them directly to enter their name and email!

Nothing, it's fantastic. Best recruiting tool by a long shot.

I am the Head of User Experience and use this tool to recruit users for all tests - across multiple products as well as get fast and large amounts of insights from our customers via surveys. It answers large questions for our business.

Ethnio allows me to organize my digital advisory panel communications.

There are quite a few settings in Ethnio I do not understand how to use.

I realized I can communicate with the participants from beginning to end with Ethnio rather than taking the final communications (confirmations) offline.

Finding qualified participants for research quickly is often a barrier to doing user research. Ethnio empowers teams to do intercept/time aware research and share sophisticated screeners so agile teams get past this blocker. As a recent example, I shared a screener on Craigslist and Twitter and in 3 days, had over 225 qualified recruits for my research and scheduled 40 of them to support standing research in our sprints and iterative design cycles. I've been using Ethnio for 8 years in professional and educational capacities and I've been super impressed with how much the product has grown to accommodate needs of the research community while maintaining a support team that is as fast, friendly and supportive as ever.

There's a learning curve to getting the most out of all of the sophisticated features Ethnio has to offer and it can be daunting to team members new to the product.

That said, with enterprise accounts, the Ethnio support team very patiently hosts training for teams and is very speedy with responses to questions. They've also helped us optimize our screeners in advance of launch so they appear correctly on social media, etc.

Ethnio will teach you how to get good at creating screeners and you should read some of their help content or best practices in advance of launching your first screener.

It's an integrated recruiting tool so I'm not juggling emails, spreadsheets, calendars, payment processing and receipts across 10 different accounts and tools in order to get participants for research quickly. More importantly, it empowers my teams to fit user research into our 2-week sprint cycles because we have recruits ready and scheduled. In addition, we can share detailed participant matrices with our clients, many of whom are as committed as we are to making sure we are speaking to a diverse range of participants – again, I don't have to go to 3-4 different tools to share screening criteria and how well our studies meet the criteria – it's all there in Ethnio. Lastly, Ethnio's live-intercept screeners are incredible when you are able to use them. With just a few lines of code added to the site you're studying, you can do time-aware research and this always feels like magic and yields incredible results for iterating design.

At a large financial tech company, Ethnio provided us with compliance and security customization like crazy, which was hugely important. Aside from Qualtrics, Ethnio was the only other product that got through security. Ethnio is created specifically for UX Research, and it shows. There are a bunch of tools out there, but none with Ethnio's functionality. You can tell Ethnio was built with real research projects in mind. Every research project is different, needs specific participants, screeners, etc., and Ethnio really understands that and has tons of tools that help you really customize and templatize projects. We leaned heavily on Ethnio's "Pool" feature to house our participant database, where we could filter for specific criteria, and set up "Pool Rules" so we weren't emailing people too often or having the same people in our research projects back to back. The difference between using Ethnio and using tools that were not designed for participant management was like night and day. Lastly, customer service was incredible. Very friendly, quick response time, always available to jump on a call or demo, and just a great team to work with all around. 

There's a bit of a learning curve at first, with a lot of new settings to keep track of, but once you learn the workflow and get more familiar with the tool, it’s not an issue. Having many ways to customize your project is such a huge plus!

Do it! I always recommend Ethnio to anyone in this field. Again, there really just isn't anything else out there with the capabilities that Ethnio has.

Screening - with logic!

Recruitment management and scheduling - the 'picky' scheduling tool is my favorite!

Incentive payments - so easy and lots of options!

Participant database - there's nothing like the 'Pool' tool out there that I've found. Super helpful to track and manage.

It saves time.

Before using ethnio, our team took from 1.5 to 2.5 days to recruit participants for in-person or remote studies. Now we can have in-person participants with less than 2 hours of work, and can have a remote study running in about 30 to 45 minutes.

It integrates well, both visually and with our data.

Ethnio lets us intercept and recruit real users doing real activities on our website and app, in a way that feels natural to them, and well-integrated to our brand and visuals. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference it makes to have this quality of participants over traditional recruitment methods, like panels and e-mail. It is also very easy to integrate the user and session information to minimize the number of questions we need to screen participants. E.g. phone OS, number of purchases, which we could then use to only schedule android participants with little experience in buying goods with us.

It covers all the needs for participant recruitment -even those we didn't know we had.

Since ethnio is a dedicated recruitment tool made by and for UX researchers, it embodies the knowledge of your current AND future needs. For example, at one point we needed to start scheduling users automatically –since it was taking a lot of time–, and ethnio already had that feature, even integrated with google calendar.

Their support team works close to us and is willing to incorporate our feedback.

Even though there weren't many situations in which we needed support, the few were good experiences. It felt very much like working with a teammate rather than with a vendor. Also of note, we've seen many of our suggestions for UX enhancements and features implemented shortly after.

I wouldn't say there's something I dislike, but that investing some time learning is a "fair price" to master any power tool. I wouldn't expect to install photoshop and master it in an hour, for example.

Nonetheless, we could be up and running on the first day, and then we learned most of the features and integrations in the first month.

If you are serious about maturing your UX research practice, try ethnio.

We take less time recruiting and more time researching.

The reason this has proved game-changing is that accelerating recruitment also accelerated ALL of the other research processes, which in turn resulted in:

* The mitigation of the "we don't have time to research" frictions.

* An increase in our ability to get buy-in from teams and senior management.

* A vast enhancement in the quality of our research, thanks to the time we _didn't_ spend in recruiting

I've been working with Ethnio for five years at three different companies. At Facebook and Airbnb, I used Ethnio to manage research operations (specifically intercepts and participant management) across teams of 60+ researchers. Now that I work as a team of two, I use Ethnio to carry the burden of research operations for my own studies. I've found Ethnio to be extremely adept to a variety of situations, and the customer service at Ethnio is second-to-none. Any question I have I get an answer to often within an hour, sometimes I notice they just fix the issue on my behalf and send a quick notification about it. I like that with Ethnio I can do everything from source participants on my own site, to run brand surveys, to create email templates, to manage my pool of participants. I love the incentive features, too and have used them since the days of just Amazon gift cards. It's such an easy tool and my go-to starting place for almost every project I start. I can't recommend it enough for budding research operations teams trying to handle multiple streams of work across researchers, all the way down to scrappy startups of one or two researchers.

Ethnio, like most small research tool companies, has bugs occasionally. To get around issues with this I try to test my projects with Ethnio before I launch to avoid unexpected errors. The Ethnio team is always learning, so I've found that being honest and proactive with my feedback has helped resolve any issues I have.

Be sure to email info@ethn.io if you have any questions at all. I've saved a ton of time by just asking! Further, be sure to use tagging whenever possible. Ethnio is feature rich, so it's important to use tags and naming conventions that will pay dividends later as you utilize more features or start more studies.

With a lack of user data to pull from, Ethnio allows me to easily get access to real customers through their intercept tool. Additionally, our team is scrappy and not ready to buy into a managed brand survey platform so I use Ethnio has a quick way to get feedback about our tool and experience for our brand team. Finally, Ethnio makes it easy to manage participants across a variety of projects and easily keep tabs on where they came from, when and what interaction they've had with our research team.