methinks Releases Significant New Features and UX Enhancements

It’s an exciting day for the methinks teams in the US and Korea. Today, we’re releasing a significant update to the methinks service. The release includes a few big features and user-experience enhancements. We’re super excited about it, and we hope you will see immediate benefits.

What’s different? 

Let’s break it down.

B-Y-O-… U?

The most significant new feature is the addition of what we call “BYOU” or Bring Your Own Users. Simply put, this means you now have two options when starting a project:

You can use the methinks network of more than 400,000 Thinkers as the pool of potential participants for your project.

or

You can “BYOU” and provide your own, predetermined users who will take part in your project.

Our goal is to enhance the research subject flexibility afforded to researchers. Qualitative research is already a very time-intensive process and finding research subjects comprises a lot of the “overhead.” Providing the most choice to our customers is a priority for us, and, by enabling customers to supply their own pool of participants, we give them choice and control over the research panel composition. 

The only participant information needed for the BYOU option is a customer’s email address. In the absence of this information, you can still generate an invitation URL that will bring a customer directly into a research project and interview session.

The methinks BYOU invitation URL is “responsive” based on where a research user opens the link. When opened on a mobile device, it will direct a user to download the methinks app (iOS or Android) or to the gig landing page. Either way, no sign-up is required — we’re not foisting our app install and account creation on your customer as a condition for using methinks.

Major Enhancements to methinks Video Editing

Video is the heart of our platform. It’s what brings the entire thing to life and personalizes the experience for participants and researchers alike. It is the reason we give our video features a lot of love and attention, molding and shaping its elements over time until we got it right. We’ve been working on some exciting updates and additions to the video editing features in the methinks business app. We want to give you some information about what you can expect when you use these features now that they’re widely available.

Video editing in methinks is now much easier and more customizable. Before, each captured video interview had to be part of a cumulative edit. With this release, you can easily select which participant interviews to use, create clips and stitch them together, however you like. 

So, how are we doing this?

It turns out that building these new video editing features is hard. We had to make the infrastructure to support these new video editing features from scratch. The previous version of the methinks service couldn’t support these features because we built them on industry-standard versions of a standard video technology called WebRTC, which we covered in a previous post. Unlike our competitors, we didn’t want to settle for “off the shelf” capabilities. So, we tore it all down and built it back up to provide the best quality experience for our customers and Thinkers.

Attention to detail is the hallmark of good product experience — we’re aiming above good because we work with many leading-brand customers across the world. We want methinks to be the best. While we’re releasing this new version of our product to the world, our team is already hard at work refining, coding, designing, and improving the product for the next release.

We can’t wait to hear what you think!