Insights Unlocked
Powering smarter research: what the UserTesting acquisition of User Interviews signals for UX research
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we're diving into a big moment in the research world, user testing's acquisition of user interviews. Guest host Kate Towsey joins Baran Urkel and Basil Fakhoury to talk about what this means for researchers, the vision behind the move, and how the combined platforms will shape the future of customer insights. Enjoy the show.
welcome to insights unlocked an original podcast from user testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world from concept to execution
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager here at User Testing. And joining us today as guest host is Kate Towsey. Kate is a ResearchOps thought leader, advisor, coach, and educator.
She's the author of Research That Scales, the editor-in-chief of the ResearchOps Review, and the founder of the ChaCha Club, a member's club for ResearchOps professionals.
Chapter 2: What does the acquisition of User Interviews by UserTesting signify for researchers?
She is also an auto-documentarian, recently exploring the past, present, and future of research ops in a five-part series published on the Awkward Silences podcast. Welcome to the show, Kate.
Really great to be here.
And our guests today are Baran Erkal and Basel Fakhoury. Basel is the co-founder and CEO of User Interviews, and Baran is the Chief Strategy Officer at User Testing. Recently, user testing acquired user interviews, and this episode is an opportunity to talk about what that means for our listeners in the research community. Welcome, everyone.
Thank you, Nathan.
And a quick note that we've asked Kate to be our guest host, given her leadership role in the research community. Kate is not being paid for her appearance, but User Interviews is a sponsor of the Research Ops Review. And with that, enjoy the show.
Wonderful. So let's really start with the big picture because we've seen a lot of chatter, particularly on LinkedIn. People have been blown away by the merger, a lot of interest in it, but also a lot of emotions around it. Basil, let's start with you. Why now? Why now is now the right time for user testing and news interviews to become one, I guess?
Awesome. Okay. First of all, really excited that you're hosting this. For everyone who doesn't know, I've known Kate for almost a decade since we were building user interviews.
We got way back.
Yeah. Coming up with the concept of research operations. But yeah, a lot of the, there's many reasons now is the right time. One of which is user testing right now. I think the leadership at user testing, I've been able to get to know over the past year. Brian and I coincidentally live ten minutes from each other.
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Chapter 3: How will the platforms maintain openness and flexibility post-acquisition?
User Interviews built the best panel in the industry and one that we heard from our customers that they were very, very happy with. And they asked us, could we work more closely together between our platforms? You know, the vision is really to do that and make it easier for customers to recruit the people they're looking for and to get high quality feedback.
And then to get customer insights in the ways that they want to through different methodologies and ultimately, you know, leverage AI to make that more efficient and scale that throughout their organizations, which I'm sure is something we'll talk more about here.
Yeah, I imagine. AI is such a big theme at the moment, of course. I've got an add-on question to this. What does this moment, this moment of an acquisition like this represent for the user research community in your mind?
For the research community, I think this moment, we would hope, represents a signal of strong investment in the importance of research, in the discipline, and a recognition of this time of change. I think that Basil also talked about in the need to scale research and...
scale insights throughout organizations especially as companies are dealing with this ai era that is raising lots of questions lots of opportunities lots of risks and concerns we think about that a lot we talk about that a lot with executives that are our customers around the ceo all the way on down thinking about this as a massive opportunity but a massive area
of potential disruption and that ultimately customer insights is one of the things that will differentiate the winners and the losers in this AI era for the next 10, 20 years. So I think the research community and everyone in this discipline has the opportunity to step up in this moment and really help their organizations lead through this change and win in this era.
We really want to be a partner in that. And so we're making investments like user interviews and others in our platform to support that.
Yeah, and maybe just to add on from my perspective for the broader research community and for other founders in the space, you know, this investment is coming from user testing and from Toma Bravo, who is, you know, one of the largest software investors. And I think to me, this is a real Testament that, Hey, user research is here to stay and it's, it's going to grow.
And there's a lot of value for user research. And that's why a fund like Toma Bravo would want to put more money into the space because they believe that when they look across their portfolio, that understanding your customers and getting close to your customers is incredibly important.
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Chapter 4: What future investments are planned for Research Hub and panel innovation?
It's to build and add on to that and find more ways that there can be more touch points. So to me, I think this is just going to be The way we see this is just more investment in the research community, building on what User Interviews has built directly with the scale and investment of user testing.
SARAH BALDWIN- Varun, did you want to add something?
I would just underline what Pascal said earlier about openness. We believe in customer choice. We talked about this with our sales group this morning and with our leadership team. We want to support customers and which tools they want to use. And so they'll be able to do that with user interviews and the tool of their choice.
Now, our job, you know, as leaders of the business here at user testing is to make the experience with user testing as great as we can and then, you know, let customers make their choice there. So we'll be focusing our investments there, but also supporting the openness that user interviews has been so successful with. And we have no plans to change that.
It's amazing. I'm excited to see what you do with all the extra firepower. From the participant side, there's being anxiety about stricter screening and fewer tests and lower pay. Bron, what do you have to say to that? Is that something that they should be fearful of?
I've been on Reddit as well. I've seen those. And we have very, very active participants. And we think a lot about participants at user testing. Since in my chief strategy officer role, I also manage the operational side of our panel and have spent the last year really going deep into panel operations and our participant network and the participant experience. And we spent a lot of time
talking about elevating the role of the participant and the focus on the participant. to be equal to how we talk about customers and employee experience. And so for us, that's a very important question that you asked. What we wanna do is continue what works well for participants and customers today.
And so the different models that we have with user interviews, flexible payments, deeper profiling and targeting, and then user interviews, sorry, user testing, the kind of more rapid fixed incentive model. We want to blend and keep the best of both worlds and let both groups of participants, both panels partake in those. And so ultimately they should have more opportunities, not less. Now,
They are two different operating models and two different tech stacks. We're working on how we bring those together now, and it'll take us some time. But we're going to be really thoughtful about not just the customer experience throughout that, but the participant experience as well. And ultimately, participants need to be happy.
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Chapter 5: How will participant experiences be prioritized after the merger?
And that will just allow us to have faster innovation on the panel faster innovation for participant experience, and ultimately, you know, one kind of marketplace that we can manage most effectively for both customers and participants. I think that'll be much better than if we run two in parallel. So we have to be really thoughtful about how we get there.
It does involve, you know, being thoughtful about the change journey for our participants. But that is the ultimate vision that we have.
Basil, do you want to jump in?
Yeah, I agree. And I think, though, you know, when you talk about a panel, you know, if someone who hasn't managed one, me and Veronica are very in the weeds there. But there's a lot of nuance within a panel. Right. So there is all of the tech on top of it that matches the right participants, sends them the right studies. There is all the fraud detection. So.
We want to take the best from both so that we think that if we take the best from both, that builds the best experience for the participants. So through merging the panels, we might be able to combine our kind of fraud detection and find out that, hey, we can have an even higher quality rate than we already have.
We might say, hey, you know, combining the panels means that some participants from this panel probably don't want to do this type of study. So we'll have to make smart tagging. So it's not like you just pour both of them in one bucket and they all mix together. There's a lot of nuance and tech and data that combine the company to spend decades building together.
So when we do that, it'll be very nuanced, but. it makes sense to put them together because as we continue those investments, we can deploy it across the whole combined panel going forward.
Yeah, and use the strengths of each side, which makes a lot of sense. I'm going to stick with the topic of panels. This is for you, Basil. Will user interviews move away from also maintaining and enhancing research hub, the CRM? This seems to be a move away from that space for many people.
Yeah, I think we just had RKO for user testing last week in Atlanta. And I will say if we take away investment from that, I think the whole multi-hundred person sales team at user testing will be very mad at me. There's a lot of excitement about Research Hub within user testing.
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Chapter 6: What is the evolving role of research in an AI-driven future?
We love Research Hub. I didn't get to chime in there, but I mean, our customers have been asking for Research Hub capabilities for quite some time. So we're super excited about it. But yeah, we hope to delight if we do our jobs well. And we're very focused on doing the integration well. We've got a whole team that's dedicated to it.
We've got a team that's done integrations before at previous companies. So we have a playbook. It's very employee centric. It's very customer centric. Now participant centric, maybe a new chapter in the playbook. And so, yeah, we hope that we can offer things they loved and then new things that the community will look forward to.
This is related. I'm going to put it in any way. You've emphasized that user interviews remains independent and open. How do you plan to achieve that in practice? It really builds off what we've been talking about anyway, but we might consolidate some ideas in there.
Yeah, I can start. So we are, you know, I should make clear, like we're bringing the companies together and our teams together. I think we are going to be better together. And there's a lot of knowledge sharing that's going on right now. A lot of roadmap planning around integrations and capabilities we can accelerate across the products.
In terms of commercial offering zone products that, you know, people can buy, that's where the openness will can, you know, the independence openness will be seen by the market and by the community. So, you know, we'll continue to offer Recruit as a standalone. We'll continue to offer Research Hub as a standalone.
And then you'll also see bundles and integrated offerings where it's just easier to buy or easier just in the workflow based on the product integrations that we're investing in.
Mm-hmm. Basil, did you want to add anything there?
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. You know, there will be still the ability to buy user interviews directly and, you know, on its own. But then they will also, like Brown said, be bundles. And then for people that have user testing already, they'll have, you know, easier access to user interviews, a research hub or the or the recruit participants. So, yeah, it's one company.
We're going forward together, but We want to meet researchers where they are.
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Chapter 7: What can researchers expect moving forward from this partnership?
Great. Anything to add, Basil?
No, I think they're going to remain. They're going to be there. People can continue to use them or use user interviews with user testing through a more direct connection.
Basil, there's a growing worry amongst researchers that industry shifts like consolidations and budget cuts are making research feel more fragile. I know a lot of people are feeling pretty fragile with the layoffs of the last four years as it is.
How does this acquisition support the long-term health of the research profession and what message are you sending to researchers who are questioning the future and their place in the field? It's a pretty heavy question.
Yeah. Look, I mean, there's dislocations across all markets, across a lot of tech now, and I think we know research has been affected by these dislocations. I personally believe that the technological shifts, specifically with AI, mean that there's more of a need to understand users because as behavior changes, your kind of preconceived notions become less... are less...
consistent going forward. So you need to better understand your users. And I think that as people are investing in AI, better understanding your customers will more and more become a differentiation. But for this acquisition directly, I think one, it's now a stronger company. Therefore, there can be more investment in our products and a delightful experience for customers.
But broader, going back to what I said before, I think it's showing that some of the best investors in the world have a strong belief that user research will continue to be important, will continue to grow. And it's worth investing in because of that growth going forward. So to me, I think it's just a really good signal for a future of user research.
That being said, I do think there will be a lot of change in that transition. You know, it's a moment of change across many industries, including user research.
The thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently is Schramperter, I think he was a Belgium economist, his notion of creative destruction. And I feel we're right in the heart of Schramperter's creative destruction, where for me, when there is change, acquisitions are a change, but also the industry is in a state of flux and there's enormous opportunity for the research world to step in.
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Chapter 8: What lessons from past acquisitions are relevant to this merger?
What hard lessons from past acquisitions are shaping how you approach this one?
Oh, that's a great question, Kate. Acquisitions, mergers are complex things. Humility, I would say, is something that a lesson me and my team have learned over and over in listening and learning as much as talking and kind of directing. As the acquirer, as an early acquirer, you can make the mistake of thinking,
you've got everything figured out and you've got the plan and trying to snap something into that structure and plan. Over my years, I've learned to listen first, learn as much as possible and really engage our new teammates in building the plan, building the vision of the future. That's at the foundation of how we think about acquisitions.
And so Basil, his leadership team, they're engaged in our weekly efforts to come together, talk about how things are going and then build the plan across our 15 or 20 work streams. So I'd say humility and just being very thoughtful is one. And then customer centricity.
I mean, we have talked so much in the last two months about how do we make this just amazing for customers, really customer friendly. You know, regards to the acquisition over the years, I've found that if you do that well, you can make mistakes elsewhere. But things usually take care of themselves if you take care of customers.
Can I ask a question about pacing? I'm curious about... humility and putting customers first, but is there something around how quickly things happen? I've heard about certain mergers in the past, not even just an acquisition, but a merging of technology where the pacing has been off and things have been done in too much of a hurry.
Have you got any thoughts around the pacing of an acquisition and the merging of technologies?
Lots of thoughts. I mean, the short answer is it's highly dependent on the situation and, you know, kind of what you're trying to do in the two companies and platforms that you're potentially trying to bring together. I think there's a balance, though. There's, you know, you can go too fast and not be thoughtful enough and make mistakes.
You can also take way too long and, you know, not show value to customers for too long because maybe you're striving for perfection or maybe, you know, You bit off more than you can chew and took on something unrealistic. And so we're trying to be both very thoughtful and very fast. There's natural tension there, but it's healthy tension, I think.
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