UserTesting introduces Advanced Targeting, bringing User Interviews' industry-leading participant network directly into UserTesting. New capability gives research teams seamless access to verified B2B and hard-to-reach participants without leaving the UserTesting platform. Aug. 12, 2026 Press Contacts Susie Penner BELLEVUE, Wash. - UserTesting, the leading provider of customer insights for the enterprise, today announced the launch of Advanced Targeting, a new capability that gives customers direct access to the User Interviews participant network from within the UserTesting platform. The release marks the first major product integration following UserTesting's acquisition of User Interviews, combining two industry-leading participant networks into a single research workflow. With Advanced Targeting, research, product, design, and marketing teams can recruit verified B2B professionals, niche consumer audiences, and hard-to-reach specialists without switching tools or managing multiple vendors. Researchers can define advanced audience criteria, set custom incentives based on audience complexity, and launch studies from a single workflow - all while managing recruitment through a shared prepaid balance. "This is an important milestone in bringing together the strengths of UserTesting and User Interviews," said Basel Fakhoury, SVP of Network at UserTesting and former CEO and co-founder of User Interviews. "Customers have told us they want access to more specialized audiences without adding complexity to their research process. Advanced Targeting delivers exactly that. We're combining the industry's most trusted participant network with UserTesting's leading insights platform so teams can recruit the right people, run studies faster, and make confident decisions from one connected experience." Advanced Targeting gives customers direct access to a broad range of audiences that have traditionally been difficult, slow, or expensive to recruit - including senior decision-makers, small business owners, specialized technology professionals, and participants working across finance, healthcare, and other complex industries. Backed by a network that includes 3.2 million professionals across 140 industries, customers can refine recruitment using detailed professional, personal, and product-usage criteria to reach the people whose perspectives matter most. Researchers can also set custom participant incentives to improve recruitment success for difficult-to-source audiences while viewing participant costs, processing fees, and available prepaid balance before launching a study. Advanced Targeting supports unmoderated tests, interaction tests, live conversations, and surveys. A Simpler Way to Reach the Right Participants Finding qualified participants (particularly B2B professionals and specialized audiences) has historically required researchers to stitch together multiple vendors, spreadsheets, approval processes, and recruitment platforms. Advanced Targeting eliminates those disconnected workflows by allowing teams to design studies, recruit participants, and analyze results in one place. Customers benefit from: * Faster recruitment for niche and hard-to-reach audiences * Flexible incentives that improve fill rates for specialized participants * Greater transparency into participant qualifications and study costs * A single end-to-end workflow from audience creation to insight The launch also represents the first step toward a unified UserTesting and User Interviews participant ecosystem, providing customers access to over seven million participants across 34 countries. Advanced Targeting is available as an Early Access offering through September 30, 2026, helping organizations expand B2B research programs, strengthen enterprise procurement opportunities, and accelerate research across specialized audiences.

Highlights from UserTesting's Crafted 2026: build fast, build right. Jun 8 2026 On May 28, Forrester Research, Inc. joined the research community at UserTesting's Crafted event in Seattle. The energy was palpable, with passionate researchers and designers eager to evolve their craft responsibly and effectively in the age of AI. A clear takeaway of the event was that building fast doesn't matter if you're not building the right thing. As AI makes creation easier, decisions grounded in research and insights become the true differentiator. Here's its other takeaways and what they mean for experience research: * UserTesting is meeting builders where they work. Before AI, experience research platforms were trending toward all-in-one platforms designed to serve all research needs. That trajectory is shifting. As AI transforms how work gets done and how information flows across organizations, the future is in integrated systems that embed insights directly into workflows. UserTesting's newly announced MCP servers reflect this shift - enabling builders from research to design to launch tests from the AI tools that they use, such as Claude. Similarly, its Figma plugin allows teams to initiate studies without leaving the Figma canvas. These moves expand access to insights to a broader group of "builders" - not only researchers and designers but also product managers, marketers, and anyone who builds experiences. * Data quality is a competitive advantage. AI can scale value - but also dysfunction if it operates on the wrong foundations. That's why high-quality human data matters even more in the age of AI: It deepens customer understanding and provides the right context for AI to scale. As organizations increasingly train internal LLMs and build synthetic personas, continuous access to real human data is critical to keeping those systems accurate and relevant. UserTesting reinforces this by expanding its panel and platform capabilities: It already had a strong participant panel, recently acquired UserInterviews to grow it further, and announced plans to add AI-moderated interviews to the platform soon. * Designer and researcher roles are evolving. As AI takes on execution-heavy tasks, designer and researcher roles are shifting upstream and towards strategy. As Jason Giles, VP of product design at UserTesting, put it, "If you see your work as producing reports or building prototypes only, you're at risk." The real power lies in asking strategic questions and protecting human-centered design principles while integrating AI responsibly and effectively. Baran Erkel, chief strategy officer at UserTesting, said, "When anyone can build anything, the winners will be the ones who know what to build." In this era, the value of researchers and designers increasingly comes from their ability to guide organizations strategically, bringing empathy, context, creativity, judgment, and taste to decision-making. * Strong relationships remain the bedrock of success. Another key message from the keynotes: Focus on mindset - not tools - to drive transformation. Amid all the discussion of AI and automation, Brad Carrera, senior manager of design research at McDonald's, pointed out that relationships still matter most. He emphasized the importance of returning to fundamentals. As his team increasingly offloads monotonous, repetitive, work to AI he encourages them to reinvest that time in strengthening existing relationships and cultivating new ones across the organization. In large, complex organizations influence, not just research and data, drives impact. What's next? AI is helping organizations move faster, but it's time to change the focus from speed to value. The real opportunity lies in how teams reinvest the time AI gives back to create better experiences. It was great to meet passionate researchers and designers who were thoughtful of this need and eager to learn how to transform the craft. Forrester Research, Inc. discuss these themes further in its latest report, Build Your AI-Enabled Research And Design Workflow. AI is transforming the design workflow by compressing phases, blurring roles, and reshaping how teams collaborate. If you would like to compare notes from Crafted or discuss its report, Forrester Research, Inc.'d love to connect. You can set up a conversation with Forrester Research, Inc.. You can also follow or connect with Forrester Research, Inc. (Gina Bhawalkar and Senem Guler Biyikli) on LinkedIn if you'd like.

Neal Gottsacker joins UserTesting as CTO to advance ai-led customer insights. Published. April 21, 2026 UserTesting has appointed Neal Gottsacker as Chief Technology Officer, placing him in charge of the company's research and development organization as it expands its use of AI across customer insights and enterprise decision-making. The company said the appointment comes as businesses shift away from traditional research and analytics toward faster, AI-assisted models that still rely on direct human feedback. Gottsacker will help lead UserTesting's next stage of product development, with a focus on integrating AI throughout the research lifecycle while maintaining transparency, trust, and human oversight. The broader strategy centers on helping enterprises combine machine-driven speed with customer perspectives drawn from real-world experiences. In the role, Gottsacker will oversee continued investment in AI-assisted research, insight synthesis, and emerging agent-based workflows intended to help organizations make more informed decisions. Chief Executive Officer Eric Johnson stated, "AI is fundamentally changing how decisions get made inside modern enterprises," adding that Gottsacker's experience will help the company deliver systems where "AI accelerates insight, and humans remain accountable for decisions." Before joining UserTesting, Gottsacker held senior technology leadership positions at Nintex, led a division of HP Software, and also founded and operated his own startup. He said UserTesting is well-positioned to shape how companies understand customers in an AI-driven environment, arguing that the combination of human insight and AI analysis can help organizations move faster, reduce risk, and improve decision-making at scale.