Before we look ahead at 2020, it's time to recap all the great Recollective product improvements we shipped last year.
It's hard to believe it's already 2020. We started developing Recollective in 2010 so it's been nearly a full decade since its inception. We're extremely proud of the product, and we're just as proud of our team — they've worked very hard to make Recollective the success that it has become.
To kick off this next decade of fantastic advancements, we have the most significant product extension in Recollective's history to announce soon... but before we get to that, let's recap all the great improvements we released last year.
Our product updates in 2019 included:
Recollective recently added the ability to capture screen recordings without the need to install any software or custom browser extensions. It allows you to watch and listen as participants experience websites, interactive prototypes, streaming videos or any other computer-based stimulus.
Simply select "Screen Recording" from the task list when building an activity and you will see it's actually part of the Multimedia task type and thus can be combined with other types of media capture.
Screen recordings benefit from all the great video analysis features already in Recollective:
In 2020 we're hoping to extend screen recoding to capture the participant's webcam in addition to the screen and microphone audio. Learn more about Screen Recording.
Photos are utilized throughout Recollective by administrators and participants. They’re used in everything from projective exercises to visual customizations of the study and its activities.
When adding a photo, a keyword search now appears that will instantly search millions of available images. Recollective then provides you a number of ways to filter and sort those results:
The new photo search capability appears in nearly all areas that a photo can be added:
Learn more about Stock Photo Search
Despite a focus on qualitative research, Recollective is quite adept at collecting quantitative data from the same participants. Since we want our customers spending time engaging and moderating, we've provided a new set of chart customization options to ensure the data tables and related charts can tell the right story.
Chart customization includes the following capabilities:
Learn more about Chart Customization
In a related improvement, administrators can also customize the default color theme for all charts produced in a study. Once set, each chart will cycle through the selected colors while still allowing individual color overrides to take place.
When designing an online research project, mixing different question types is needed to execute certain methodologies but also to maximize engagement with participants. Recollective has many dedicated task types but sometimes the right design needs a mix of questions on a single page. This is where the "Fill the Blanks" task type is most useful.
In 2019, we enhanced the Fill the Blanks task by adding three new question types:
It is now possible to create an input area for the submission of one or more photos. Photo submission is already part of the Multimedia task type but having it within Fill the Blanks allows for a more customized arrangement of photo submissions and follow-up questions to be created.
Scale questions are often used to quantify things like agreement, awareness, consideration, familiarity, frequency, importance, likelihood, quality, satisfaction, and more.
Multiple sets of sliding scales can now be added to a single Fill the Blank task. The scale labels can can be customized but many presets are provided to save time. The items being rated can even be randomized.
We took scale questions a bit further by also allowing allocation questions to be defined. They're used when you want participants to allocate a limited quantity (e.g. time, money, etc.) across a list of items.
Learn more about Scale and Scale Allocation.
Live Group Chat is not new to Recollective but it was given a new name and an entirely new Backroom experience. It was also provided a refreshed appearance and made free to all existing Recollective customers.
The key update in Live Group Chat was the introduction of an observation-only experience for Client administrators. They can now join live group chats while remaining hidden from participants in a segregated backroom. Learn more about Live Group Chat and its recent update.
As an enterprise-grade research solution for some of the world's largest companies, Recollective also makes privacy and security a top priority. Our customers demand it and we have a duty to protect all our users and their data.
To this end, a significant portion of our development in 2019 was spent adding security features or improving Recollective's resiliency:
In all the work we do in a year, an area of development that goes largely unnoticed is the continuous improvements we make to all of Recollective's existing functionality.
We actively support and run our own software and so the qualitative insights we have about our own product is fantastic. We try to be good listeners and endeavour to resolve key pain points while also looking for trends in support issues.
2019 was no exception as we made a number of performance and usability improvements. Usability enhancements are easier to spot but in case you missed them, here's a quick roundup of some recent changes:
Recollective technical support, self-help resources, webinars and personalized training are important aspects of the Recollective experience.
We had previously updated our webinar and training tools and this year we made a big update in the support ticketing system and self-serve knowledge base.
You can reach our dedicated support team while inside Recollective by selecting the question mark icon in the lower-right corner of all pages OR by simply emailing helpdesk@recollective.com.
Our in-app support tool will always suggest helpful articles in the context of your current location within the application. You can search that knowledge base by keyword or browse it any time by visiting helpdesk.recollective.com.
We're very thankful to all our customers for all their support and generous feedback. Our record-breaking growth in 2019 will quickly be eclipsed in 2020 and we plan to keep on delivering the goods.
Next month, we'll be launching a major new capability that we've hinted at for months now. We look forward to telling you all about it soon.
If you haven't already experienced Recollective first-hand or haven't had a project in the past year, please contact us for a demonstration to see all the latest enhancements in action! If you read all of this, you might also be interested my Recollective: 2018 in Review blog post