Product Update: Observer Rooms, Streamlined Interview Management, Governance Activity Feed & Email Compliance

We’re excited to officially announce the star of this month’s update: Observer Rooms! 🎥 Witness live user interactions and get unfiltered user insights straight from the source without interrupting the flow. It's like having a front-row seat to the action without accidentally stealing the spotlight.

We also rolled out new Interview and Governance activity feeds, amplifying transparency and collaboration within your workspace. Plus, we've got your back with new email safeguards, ensuring better deliverability and compliance.

Here’s what’s shiny and new:

Livestream user interviews with Observer Rooms 

With Observer Rooms, you can invite team members to livestream user interviews without intimidating or distracting the participant. Observer Room links are automatically generated and included in a separate calendar invite to observers.

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Observer Rooms allow you to: 

👉 Democratize research by inviting observers to view live user interviews without having to manually create additional meeting links. 

👉 Access, view, and download interviews at any time.

👉 Share specific internal information to observers only, and protect participant PII.

👉 Keep participants comfortable without any distractions during the interview.

Read more about Observer Rooms here. 

See how to get observer rooms set up in your next Interviews study here.

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More transparency and easier management of Interviews 

We've listened to your feedback and made it easier to tweak your upcoming interviews, whether that’s sending a custom email to the participant, requesting a reschedule, or updating interview status – all with just a few clicks.

With these changes, you can: 

👉 View more details about upcoming interviews.

👉 View interview status updates when any changes are made with the new Interview Activity Feed. 

👉 Take quick actions such as join the interview, join the observer room (if enabled), send custom emails, request a reschedule, or update the status of the interview (i.e. mark as no show, completed, or canceled).  

👉 Reschedule interviews in just a few clicks – the existing calendar invite gets moved, not duplicated. 

👉 View upcoming, completed, no-shows or canceled interviews at-a-glance in the Interviews tab.

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Keep tabs (ahem...governance tabs) on your participants 

We’ve refreshed the Governance tab in all Person profiles. Access and update the person’s contact status, plus view the new Governance Activity Feed that shows you when the participant’s contact status changed, what it changed to, and why.

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‍Be even more confident when sending emails 

We’ve introduced new warnings when you edit an email so that you don’t accidentally send an email with {first name} instead of the actual personalization token! We also added a warning for when you might be missing a scheduler or screener link in the email.

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Protecting your email reputation 

Rally now automatically blocklists participants from all studies if their email address returns a hard bounce* or spam compliant error*.

⛔Hard bounce: usually indicates a permanent error, but can also be caused by a strict email security filter. To protect your email reputation, Rally automatically excludes these participants from all future emails.

🟠Soft bounce*: indicates a temporary problem with the recipient's server, or another temporary technical problem with the email provider. Rally blocklists these participants from studies, but they may be emailed again in future studies.

You can now view soft and hard bounces in the ‘Outbox’ section of a study. 

*Only detected for emails sent through custom domain connected sender accounts.