UX research tools help most when they give a researcher more sessions without lowering the quality of each one. Moderators lets you write the discussion guide, set the follow-up depth, and have an AI moderator run the sessions by chat or voice, so you read transcripts and quoted themes instead of spending your week moderating.
How do you each decide what to read first?
I start with whatever my manager forwards.
Does anyone here do it differently?
I only read what has a number in the title.
Quote from the interview
“Setup took two days and nobody had time.”
A researcher can moderate perhaps a handful of sessions a day before attention fades, and each one still has to be transcribed, tagged and summarized. Stakeholders want answers from forty people and get answers from eight. The constraint is rarely method. It is hours.
Moderators does not replace research judgment. You decide the question, the audience and what counts as a good answer. The AI moderator follows your guide and asks follow-ups the way a patient moderator would: it asks what the person meant, asks for an example, and returns to a thin answer. You keep control of the work that needs a trained mind.
You describe the goal and the group. The moderator drafts a guide with objectives, questions and probes. You edit it as you would any guide: reorder, tighten leading questions, add a probe you know matters. Our post on writing a discussion guide template covers what a good one contains.
The participant opens your link and talks or types. The moderator listens to each answer and decides what to ask next from what was said, instead of reading a fixed list. If a participant mentions a workaround, the moderator asks about it.
You get a transcript for every session, themes across sessions and the quotes under each theme. Reading takes minutes per interview and you can check any claim against the original words, which is the habit that keeps synthesis honest.
Moderators is built for conversation. It does not record screens, track clicks or run task timing, so for pure usability measurement keep your current tools and use interviews to explain what the numbers show. For people who want a live human in the room, see the notes on moderated usability testing and how the two approaches combine.
Many participants find it easier to be candid when no one is judging their answer, and they answer at their own pace. It is still your job to check the transcripts for shallow replies and adjust the guide, which is why every session is available in full.
It follows your guide and your probes, and you control the wording. If a question leans, you fix it before sending the link, the same as you would for a human moderator.
You do. You invite them with your link. Moderators has no respondent panel, which keeps the sample yours and the cost low.
The Team plan is $249 per month, or $124.50 per month billed annually, with 400 chat interviews, 300 voice minutes and five seats. At the monthly price that is about 62 cents per chat interview if you use the full 400. Scale at $599 per month adds a findings repository and API, with 1,000 chat interviews, 750 voice minutes and 15 seats, which helps when several researchers share a library of past studies. Limits renew each period and do not carry over. Compare all plans on the pricing page.
Pick the study you could not staff. Write the guide, read it once, share the link and look at the first transcripts the same day. If the probes match what you would have asked, scale the study. For a broader tour of teams that use the product, see the user research use cases.