Writing

Screening launched a few days ago, but you could only really set it up through the study designer. Now every eligible question in the editor has a Use as a screening question switch. Turn it on, tick the answers that qualify, and optionally write your own exit message. Screeners carry a clear label in the question list so you can see your filters at a glance.

Better on phones

Most participants answer on their phone, and our study pages were too small there. Text was tiny, and the continue button could slide out of view on long questions. So we enlarged headings and inputs, started content higher on the screen, and pinned the continue button to the bottom so it's always within reach, even with a long list of choices to scroll through. There's also a back arrow now. In the app itself, we fixed sticky elements that covered content on smaller screens.

With one price per study, monthly plans stopped making sense, so we removed them from billing. In their place is a Research Balance. You top it up when you need to, and recruited studies draw from it when you launch. Your history shows every top-up and every study it paid for.

We also added credit codes. If you've been given one, maybe from an event or a conversation with us, you can enter it on the study's price screen and see the new total right away, before any payment happens. The code is only used up when the study actually launches. Change your mind beforehand and it's still yours.

Asking "do you sell online?" at the start of a survey only helps if the answer does something. Before this, people who didn't fit carried on anyway, and you had to sort their answers out afterwards.

Now any yes/no or choice question can act as a screener. You pick which answers qualify. Someone who gives a different answer sees a calm exit screen and, if they came from the panel, a button back to it. They're paid a small fixed amount for their time, from a capped budget, which keeps things fair for them and predictable for you.

What that means for your results:

• Screened-out people don't count toward your responses.
• You aren't charged for them as completed responses.
• Their partial answers stay out of charts, exports and insights.
• Your results show how many people were screened out, so you can tell if your criteria were too tight.

Research pricing is often confusing on purpose. Per-response fees, panel fees, platform fees, a subscription on top. We wanted you to know exactly what a study costs before you commit to it.

Here's how it works now:

• Your own audience. Smaller studies are free. Bigger ones have a simple fixed price.
• Recruited participants. One price per study, covering the people, their rewards and everything else. It depends on how many people you want and how long the study takes, and it's shown in full before you launch. There's no subscription.

The pricing page has an estimator so you can get a feel for it, and examples labelled "From" really are starting points. Bigger studies are fine, they just cost more. If you're used to research quotes that arrive after three calls, I hope this feels like a relief.

Two bugs this week, both about trust.

The first: if you changed your audience by hand and then kept chatting with the study designer, a later update from the chat could quietly undo your edit. Numbers in the audience picker could also jump while you were typing. Both are fixed. Your edits are saved as you make them, the chat no longer overwrites them, and if a save ever fails, we tell you so you can retry instead of finding out at launch.

Seeing progress, and stopping it

The second: while the designer was working, it wasn't always clear what it was doing, and the stop button sometimes couldn't be clicked until it had finished. Now there's a single status line that updates as the work moves along, and stop works at any point. We also fixed a case where you could end up with an empty reply. If you've changed your mind halfway through, you shouldn't have to wait to say so.

We watched people start new studies and noticed they hesitated at the very first step: choosing a method. Survey or interview? Most people don't know yet, and they shouldn't have to decide before they've said what they want to learn.

So there's now one New study button. You describe your goal, and the composer carries you straight into the editor in one continuous step, where the method can follow from the question. We also added workspace profile screens, where you can tell us about your company and what you're trying to figure out in your own words. That context helps every study you design afterwards start from a better place.

Recruited studies

• Demographics now come with panel results, so you can see who actually took part.
• Rewards default to our recruitment partner's recommended rate. Fair pay tends to mean better answers.
• Promotion codes can be entered at checkout when you launch.

A short one, but it mattered. Some participant share links weren't opening the study. Someone would click your invitation, willing to help, and land nowhere. That's a response lost before it started, and it makes your brand look broken too.

We fixed how those links are handled, so the affected ones now take people straight to your survey or interview. You don't need to change or reshare anything. Links you've already sent work as they are.

Last week's findings decks only lived inside Probe. That's not where most teams present, so you can now download a deck as PowerPoint or PDF. Slides use a standard 16:9 layout, charts are calculated straight from your results, and we adjusted the sizing so exported pages stay readable on a projector and on a phone.

Checkout that recovers

We also found a frustrating bug. If you started paying for a study and then closed the tab, or the payment page timed out, the study could sit in a pending state with no way forward. Now, when a checkout session expires, the study is released and you can simply go back and pay. We tracked down a few other ways unpaid studies could get stranded and closed those too. Nobody should have to email us to unstick a study.

Surveys are good at telling you how many people think something. They're less good at telling you why. For that you usually want to talk to someone, and until now that meant a separate scheduling tool, a separate video tool and a document full of notes.

You can now pick moderated interviews as the method when you create a study. The same design chat helps you build an interview guide, side by side with the guide itself. Then you set your availability, share a public booking page, and run the session inside Probe with the call built in. Planning, booking and the conversation itself happen in one place.

From results to a deck

The other half of research is telling your team what you found. For survey studies, Probe can now generate a findings deck from your results. It's a starting point, so expect to edit it, but it beats opening a blank presentation the night before the meeting.

Two kinds of feedback kept coming up in early conversations. People found parts of the app hard to scan, and they weren't sure what a recruited study would cost until late in the process. We worked on both.

A clearer look

Form labels are easier to read, panels and inputs have more consistent backgrounds, and buttons and fields share one style everywhere. Small thing, but we also fixed the banner that kept coming back after you'd dismissed it. Nothing about how you build a study changed; it should just feel calmer to work in.

Clearer costs

The homepage now explains the process in plainer words, including how long a study takes to run. Each study shows its own recruitment cost, and we tidied up how the price is worked out and displayed. We also rewrote the panel explanations for DTC teams, so it's clearer how recruiting people compares with sending a study to your own audience. If you're going to spend money on research, you should know roughly how much before you start.

A lot of the questions DTC teams want answered are visual. Which pack looks premium? Does this ad feel like us? Describing a design in words and asking people to imagine it gives you their imagination back, which isn't quite what you wanted to test.

So you can now attach an image or other media to any question. Everyone sees the same packaging, creative or product concept, and their answers are about the thing itself. It also makes questions shorter, because the picture carries the context you'd otherwise have to spell out.

A home for findings

We also added Probe Insights, a dedicated tab in your dashboard. Results used to live inside each study, which was fine for one study and awkward for five. Now there's one place to come back to when you want to review what you've learned and decide what to ask next.

Our first version made you jump between screens. You wrote questions in one place, checked how they looked in another, and launched from a third. Every hop was a chance to lose your train of thought, so we pulled it all into a single workspace.

On the left you shape the study. You can describe what you want to learn and let the conversation draft it, or edit any question yourself. Drag questions into a new order, and widen or narrow the panel when you need more room. On the right is a live preview that matches what participants actually get, including your logo and colours, which we can pick up from your website.

Launching

When it looks right, you choose who answers:

• Your own audience. Share a link with customers, your email list or followers.
• Recruited participants. Set criteria like age, country or habits, and watch a live count of how many people match as you go. Screening questions sit next to those criteria, so the eligibility rules live in one place.

There's a review step before anything is sent, and checkout is part of launch. If something goes wrong at that point, we show you the error on screen. Before this, a failed launch could look exactly like a successful one, and that's the worst kind of uncertainty when you're paying for responses.