New unified participant platform (Userzoom + Usertesting)
ROLE
Lead Product designer
TIMELINE
2024-2025
TEAM
PM · EM · Architect · 8 engineers · DS designers · UX writer · Researcher
Mobile Design
AI Design
React Native
iOS + Android
01 - THE CHALLENGE
Three platforms, three sets of rules, one audience
UserTesting acquired UserZoom and inherited a second participant platform, IntelliZoom — plus Testapic from an earlier acquisition. Three onboarding journeys, three logged-in experiences, three payment and compliance regimes. Customers got fragmented access to the audience they were paying to reach; the business built everything three times.
The challenge
Replace every legacy system with one unified app — for a product that had never shipped one — and use the clean slate to fix the web's known friction rather than port it over.
THE APP
What it is
The participant-side app for User Interviews — everything a panelist does on the web, rebuilt as a native experience.
THE GOAL
Why it exists
One unified app to replace the legacy systems, designed to fix known friction instead of carrying it over.
THE USERS
Who it's for
User Interviews participants first — then UserTesting participants and panelists, as the migration lands.
02 - What I owned
Nine surfaces, two of them from nothing
I led design across nine panelist-facing surfaces:
Dashboard and test feed · Onboarding · Profile · Settings · Message center · PayPal connection · SMS verification · Upcoming sessions · Test history
Two of those — the message center and test history — didn't exist for IntelliZoom panelists at all. We weren't reskinning; we were closing capability gaps while moving people's income source out from under them without breaking their trust.
I worked inside a large cross-functional programme — a PM, an architect, engineering, UX Writing, researchers, the design system team, and supporting designers, with Legal, Security, Support and Ops in the room whenever privacy or payments were involved. Weekly design system sessions governed every new or changed component: proposed, validated across the designers in my product line, checked with the PM against connected features before shipping. And when a small front-end issue was faster to fix than to file, I fixed it in code myself.
03 - THE CHALLENGE
How we decided what to build
With nine surfaces and a hard migration date, sequence was strategy. We scoped with MoSCoW — the forcing question was "must this exist before panelists are migrated?" — combined with t-shirt sizing that carried confidence levels, and an explicit as-is vs. innovate call for each area. Some things earned reinvention; others earned faithful reconstruction.
The resulting order: rebranding first, then test history, anti-fraud alignment, replacing the IntelliZoom dashboard with the UserTesting test feed, settings, the migration itself, and unified onboarding.
Two design intents ran through all of it:
More character. IntelliZoom's panelists liked their platform. The new one had to respect the UserTesting brand but land warmer than the customer-facing research product — friendlier illustrations, more color, a dashboard that felt like it belonged to the people using it, not to the company measuring them.
Fix the accessibility debt. The legacy platforms weren't accessible. We documented the issues before designing past them, so the rebuild raised the floor instead of repainting it. Where it mattered — the practice-test and certification flow, localized across four languages — we designed to AA.
02 - THE CHALLENGE
Research at every step
Every surface got its own study. The pattern was consistent: concept-test before committing, usability-test after shipping, and let panelists on both legacy platforms tell us where we were wrong. I structured the findings with the PRIME framework — Problem, Research, Insight, Material, Execution — so each study ended in a decision, not a slide.
May 2024 — the concept test. Before building, we put the new dashboard concepts in front of 24 UserTesting and 10 IntelliZoom participants (unmoderated, after 4 earlier discovery sessions). Satisfaction with the new designs rose roughly 8.33% for UT participants and 9.09% for IZ participants versus the current experiences. 92% of UT and 100% of IZ participants rated the new dashboard satisfied or very satisfied; 83% and 80% respectively were excited to adopt it. The new filter hit 100% task completion, with 96% calling it "very easy."
Just as important, the concept test told us where the risk was: IntelliZoom panelists missed their colorful old dashboard, multilingual panelists couldn't tell what language a test was in, and IZ panelists lived in their email, not a feed. Those three findings shaped the migration comms and the backlog.
March 2025 — testing our own shipped work. Two months after migration, we ran a usability study on the shipped "Your Tests" experience with ~20 UT contributors. The wins were real: 95% found a past test "very easy" to locate, 95% rated their confidence 7 or higher, 80% found live conversation cancel/reschedule easy. The failures were real too — more on that below.
December 2025 — eleven months in. We went back to migrated panelists and asked them to compare, candidly, against IntelliZoom. One participant, walking through test history: "I do not believe that this was even available at that time… I like knowing how much is pending, I like being able to double-check what I've done within a certain day." And on the platform overall: "I've seen a lot of improvements on every page… it just feels much more usable than it used to be."
02 - THE CHALLENGE
Deep dive: test history
The surface I'm proudest of started as an absence. IntelliZoom panelists had no way to look back — no record of pending statuses, canceled tests, or payments that had silently failed on the PayPal connection. Their money was a black box, and interviews made clear that chasing payments was a recurring anxiety.
So we built the record, and shipped it as Your Tests in July 2025: a transparent twelve-month view of every test and payment. Filters by status and time range, so a panelist reconciling their month could find exactly the payments in question. A headline summary at the top — pending payments, total earnings, completed tests — and a detailed per-test modal underneath.
That summary turned out to be more than informational. Panelists told us it was motivating; in the December study, one said they'd come back daily just to watch the numbers. The adoption data backs the feeling: 5,100+ unique visitors, a ~7.5-minute average session, and around 4,000 sustained weekly views. People don't spend seven minutes in a payments log unless it's answering a question they actually had.
Then we tested it, and our own product failed part of our own usability study. In March 2025, 35% hit friction understanding payment timing and 25% couldn't decode a failed payment. The error banner we'd shipped provided, in participants' words, "little value." The verbatims were blunt: "Can it say WHY the payment failed?" and "Hover info disappears before you can click the link."
The fix list came straight from those sessions: plain "Failed" language, failure reasons and estimated dates on the card instead of buried in tooltips, a payment-status filter, cancel/reschedule directly on live-conversation cards, and help surfaced in-context. What shipped in its place was a set of contextual payment-status banners that name the problem — an unverified PayPal account, say — and route the panelist to fix it themselves, resolving the issue without a support ticket. The banner that had "little value" became the thing that closes the loop.
02 - THE CHALLENGE
The migration: one day, everyone — de-risked with a beta
Moving every IntelliZoom panelist at once, rather than in phases, was a product and architecture call. I gave design's read on the risk and then owned the part design could control: making sure nobody woke up lost.
We didn't go in blind. In November 2024, roughly 200 panelists ran a beta of the core experience — login, navigation, home feed, profile, and the Live Conversation widget — so the flows most people would touch on day one were validated before anyone was moved. Alongside it, the design de-risking work: an email campaign ahead of the rebrand so nothing landed as a surprise; new login pages so the front door itself oriented people; a welcome banner on arrival; a guided walkthrough of where everything now lived; and a tight loop with support, monitoring for confusion or breakage in real time.
On January 22nd, 2025, all 10,000+ IntelliZoom panelists moved onto the Unified Panel. The platform they landed on had been concept-tested with their own cohort eight months earlier and beta-tested with their peers two months before.
02 - THE CHALLENGE
What the numbers say
After release, the Unified Panel's NPS reached 53 — up 3 year over year — while the legacy UT Classic panel sat at 40, down 4 over the same period. Promoters: 67.9% vs 61.5%. Detractors: 15.4% vs 21.1% — nearly a third lower. And the Unified figure held up even with a lower response rate (38% vs 49%), so it isn't a case of only the happy panelists answering. The platform people were moved to was measurably better-loved than the one that hadn't changed.
Around the headline: the new payments experience now processes over $1M in panelist payments monthly, 31,028 desktop words were localized for the multilingual panel, and — in a December verbatim about the thing operations cared about most — panelists noticed "the payouts are a little bit more quickly now."
02 - THE CHALLENGE
The honest bit
A better UI didn't fix the real complaint. Test availability and qualification barriers stayed the top detractor theme on both panels, before and after — the verbatim theme analysis named it the platform's leading retention risk. Eleven months post-migration, the angriest feedback wasn't about design at all: it was screeners with no "none of the above" option trapping dead tests on the dashboard. "That's just common sense test logic," one panelist told us, and they were right. The design was the container; the supply and screener quality inside it were another system, and no amount of interface warmth changed that. The nearest thing design could do — a Decline Invitations control that lets panelists clear unsuitable tests and sharpen their own feed — helped at the edges, not at the root.
"Unified" has an asterisk. One front door, but underneath: two distribution systems and separate payment rails. As of the September 2025 definition work, unification meant one sign-up and one panelist experience — explicitly not one payment system. Honest scoping, but a humbling gap between the name and the plumbing.
We shipped the warmth brief and still lost some charm. After all the intent about friendliness, a migrated panelist told us in December that she missed IntelliZoom's "cute little weird characters" — the new graphics read as "pretty drab." "Give me something cutesy in my day." We'd flagged this exact risk in the May 2024 concept test and it still bit us. Warmth isn't a palette; it's personality, and personality got traded away in the brand alignment.
Our own product failed our own usability test. The failed-payment finding above. Shipping a payments record and then watching a quarter of participants unable to decode a failure was uncomfortable in exactly the way good research should be — and it made the next iteration sharper than any internal review would have.
