Be faster AND better. For research teams today, that is the mandate. According to the latest GRIT Business & Innovation Report from Greenbook, the “tier 1” challenges facing research buyers today include speed expectations and data quality.
To help researchers meet this pressure, we’ve focused our product updates this last quarter on one thing: removing friction across the research workflow so teams can move faster and stay confident in their outputs. That includes building toward a future where AI outputs are grounded in your research and your unique business context.
Let’s get into what shipped—and what’s coming next.
Better insights start with better inputs. And better inputs start with the participant experience.
This quarter, we introduced new ways to make conversational surveys more intuitive and engaging for participants, without adding complexity for researchers.
We’ve introduced a new glass-inspired UI that allows teams to extend their brand directly into the research experience. With control over logos, fonts, and device-specific wallpapers, your surveys can now feel even more like a natural extension of your brand.
This is more than just a branding exercise. The goal is to make participation feel even more intuitive and engaging — and capturing more thoughtful feedback in the process.
Inspired by Apple, the Glass theme is designed to reflect the experiences people are already familiar with from modern messaging and mobile apps.
If you're a Rival customer, you’ll see that this is super easy to implement. You don’t need design resources to get it right. Built-in templates and image libraries (through an integration with Unsplash, a popular stock photo site) make it simple to create polished, high-quality experiences in minutes.
The result is research that not only looks better but drives stronger engagement and more thoughtful responses.
Rival is already a robust market research platform that lets you capture quant, qual and unlimited video feedback. This quarter, we've added new question types to our existing survey capabilities, opening even more ways to understand people’s attitudes, emotions and motivations.
Define your own units and ranges—whether it’s number of days, frequency, or price down to the cent—so inputs match the context of your study. It’s easier for participants and more relevant data for analysis.
Emoji response cards: fast, intuitive sentiment captureCapture sentiment without relying on text-heavy inputs. Participants can respond quickly using familiar visual cues, reducing friction while still providing clear, emotional feedback. This new question type can be useful for message testing, for example, and other in-the-moment research methodologies.
Rank-order prioritization: clearer tradeoffs, better decisionsEnable participants to rank options based on relative importance. Move beyond isolated preferences to understand tradeoffs, giving you more actionable insight into what matters most. This question type is a great fit for product innovation work, including IHUTs in the CPG space.
These new question types help ensure participants stay engaged and provide more detailed, thoughtful responses, leading to stronger, more reliable insights.
One of the biggest challenges in research isn’t generating insights—it’s keeping them usable throughout your organization.
Several product updates from Rival make this happen:
Together, these updates reduce manual work and make it easier for teams to share a consistent, up-to-date source of truth across the organization.
.svg)
Many multinational brands like Weber use Rival Technologies to run global insight communities. That’s why building capabilities to scale research across market is something we continue to invest in.
Soon, we’ll be rolling new features to support unified multilingual surveys. These enhancements will make it easier to create and distribute conversational surveys across multiple languages within a single study, without duplicating work or fragmenting results.
Instead of managing separate surveys by market, your team will be able to consolidate workflows while keeping insights unified. The goal is to reduce your operational overhead and improve consistency across all regions.
This is a big win if you’re running studies or branded communities in different markets or, and it’s something we’re actively testing with customers today!
As we continue to expand AI across the Rival platform, we’re focused on making it practical, trustworthy, and grounded in your data—not generic outputs. This is important because we know that making AI initiatives stick and proving their ROI are a huge priority for many researchers today.
One of the areas we’re heavily investing in is AI-powered knowledge bases.
We’re building infrastructure that indexes your research—creating a semantic layer that AI can understand and use as context. This allows AI-powered workflows and agents to operate with a deeper understanding of your specific research program, rather than relying on generic assumptions.
The result is more relevant outputs, better recommendations, and less risk of hallucination. This is foundational work, and we’re moving it into pilot in the near term as we continue to expand how AI can support research workflows across the Rival platform.
Every research team is balancing speed, scale, and quality in different ways.
If you’re actively working through any of these challenges, we can walk you through how these updates apply to your workflow—and share more on what’s coming next at Rival.
.jpg)
Got questions about insight communities and mobile research?Chat with one of our experts
No Comments Yet
Let us know what you think