Rally's Q1 Product Release Recap

Curious about what's been brewing at Rally in the first quarter of 2024? ☕ Look no further! This blog post presents a detailed rundown of all the improvements we've made to the platform over Q1. 

From enhancing the participant experience to strengthening compliance and security measures, and even launching our revamped website, there are a ton of updates we’ve made over the last few months to continue building Rally’s User Research CRM. Grab a coffee and let's dive in together!

TLDR: Watch this video!

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Enhancements that Hit the Headlines 

HIPAA Compliance 

Safeguard sensitive participant data throughout the research process. Rally is HIPAA compliant, ensuring the highest standards of data protection and privacy.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance signifies that Rally adheres to strict security and privacy standards set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This compliance ensures that protected health information (PHI) is handled and stored securely, safeguarding participant confidentiality and privacy.

Rally is committed to the protection of not only our customer’s data, but their user’s data as well. This is our latest effort to ensure our platform meets the rigorous requirements of appropriate data protection regulations. 

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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. Watch the 30 second video below featuring Rally's pets! 

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.

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We also rolled out security features for Observer Rooms to enhance control and privacy:

🫙Storage Settings: Super admins can now configure storage durations for all Observer Room data. By default, Rally stores all Observer Room data for a maximum of 1 year. 

🪟Access Settings: Choose who can access Observer Rooms, with options for link-only access, password protection, or restricted access to Rally users only.

🎥Recording Download Control: Manage who can download past recordings, whether it's study owners or super admins only.

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Rally 🤝UserTesting Integration Launch 

With the Rally and UserTesting integration, customers can capture rich, video-based insights in UserTesting or UserZoom while tapping into Rally to recruit their own users.

This integration benefits Rally customers who are already using UserTesting to conduct unmoderated tests. It will also benefit research teams using UserTesting who need a way to recruit and manage their own participants for research.

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Governance, Compliance, & Security 

Custom governance rules 

Take protecting your participants to the next level with custom governance rules. Easily create and store custom rules to put participants in a cooldown or mark them as ‘Do Not Contact.’

You may want to add a custom governance rule to…

👉Add a longer cooldown period for participants in specific panels.

👉Mark any participants from specific domains as ‘Do Not Contact.’

👉Mark participants that hit an annual incentive limit as not contactable for a period of time

👉Mark participants who are up for contract renewal in the next 30 days and have a red customer health score from Salesforce as ‘Do Not Contact,’ until they are in a good state again.

👉Add a cooldown period for participants who have recently been contacted by Marketing (via Salesforce or Snowflake integration). 

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In addition to Custom Governance Rules, we’ve also added the ability to put selected participants in a cooldown manually. This is helpful if the participant was contacted outside of Rally, causing any governance rules to not be applied.

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PHI and PII masking

Protect participant health information by marking any property in Rally as PII (Personally Identifiable Information) or PHI (Protected Health Information). 

Safely sync contacts via our integrations with Snowflake and Salesforce. All participant emails and properties marked as PII and PHI are automatically masked for Observers. 

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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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No more identity conflicts in studies 

Participants can no longer freely use any email address to book an interview. With this update, interviews are scheduled with participants using the same email address the participant was invited with. This keeps interview bookings associated with the correct participant record in Rally and prevents new participant records for the same person from being created.

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Democratization & Data Control 

Book interviews in the past, present, and future 🔮

We released Manual Interview Bookings this quarter, allowing you to: 

• Manually book an interview for a participant without them needing to schedule it themselves. 
• Book an interview while bypassing host availability, interview limits, & other scheduling restrictions created in the study. 
• Log historical interview(s) that happened in the past, or outside of Rally, so that a participant’s history stays up to date. 

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Map participants in Rally with Unique Properties

Unique Properties allow you to identify and engage with participants using customizable unique identifiers (properties), reducing reliance on email addresses and unlocking untapped participants for research.

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Add any guest to interviews via email — not just Rally users

Invite stakeholders to join or listen in on interviews, even if they don’t have a Rally account. The calendar invite will show up on their calendar.

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Participant Experience

Secure that bag 💰(more easily)

We streamlined the incentive claiming experience and updated the incentive redemption email copy so that participants can more easily redeem their incentive. 

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Scheduling interface update

We updated the scheduling interface in Rally to make it even easier for participants to book an interview. We increased visibility of the next/previous month buttons and timezone selection, plus updated available and unavailable date styling to make it super clear to see which is which. 

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Reschedule and cancel interviews in just a few clicks 

We added reschedule and cancel links directly to calendar events. This allows participants (or researchers) to update interviews quickly. 

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Add personalization to interview meeting titles

Personalization gives participants a more tailored experience with your research studies and recruitment. By adding personalization to the title of interview calendar events, both the participant and the researcher can see who they are meeting with and what the meeting is about at a glance.

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Updates That Make Your Life Easier

‍More transparency and easier management of Interviews 

We've listened to feedback and made it easier to tweak 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.

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Organize and view participant data in tables more easily

​​We updated all Participant Tables across Rally whether you’re in Studies, People, Panels, or Incentives so you can view, manage, and organize your participants your way. Customize the layout of all tables in Rally to view important information and navigate through records easily.

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Send test emails when creating new email templates 

Send a test email to yourself in just one click when editing email templates to make sure that everything is looking as it should.

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More time before meetings by default

The default minimum booking notice for interviews changed from 0 hours to 2 hours. The default notice of *no time* was creating interview surprises for researchers! This is an easy setting to change when setting up a study. 

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Search when mapping properties

Save time by searching for properties when mapping screener or survey responses. 

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Add new options to screener questions by hitting ‘Enter’

Simply hit ‘enter’ when you want to add a new option to a single- or multi-select screener question. Also, customize the ‘other’ option text to anything you want. 

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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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UI Glow Ups

New layout for scheduling types 

We updated the layout for choosing the type of scheduling when building a new interview study. This makes it easier to see the differences between 1:1, collective, and round-robin scheduling types to make your study building and scheduling process even easier. 

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Settings update

Check out Settings in Rally for a more organized and consistent interface. 

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Unveiling Our New Website! 🥁

We launched our new and improved website in January of this year. Some of our favorite new pages include: 

👉Our all-new Demo Center allows you to explore Rally’s capabilities firsthand through interactive, self-guided tours. 

👉Our new ‘Rally by Role’ pages have been thoughtfully crafted to illustrate the key workflows in Rally that are tailored to ReOps Managers, Researchers, and PMs & Designers. 

👉Our new Feature Pages allow you to dig deeper into how leading research teams like Webflow, OpenTable, Sonos, and Faire utilize Rally’s feature sets to manage end-to-end study processes.

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Read all the Details

Of course, there’s more. Check out the other enhancements we made to Rally over Q1 2024 in our Changelog.

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