Sharing & launching

Study statuses

Transitions (on the Share & publish tab): Draft → Go live → Live; Live → Pause → Paused; Paused → Go live; any state → Close study; Closed → Reopen as draft (back to an editable draft).

Readiness checks before going live

To launch you need:

• A title.
• At least 2 cards.
• For closed/hybrid sorts, at least 1 category.

The participant link

On Share & publish you'll find the participant link in the form …/s/XXXXXXXXXX (a unique 10-character code). Click Copy and share it however you recruit: email, Slack, a panel, a QR code.

• The link only works while the study is Live. In draft, paused, or closed states participants see a "not available" or "closed" message.
• Custom/branded slugs aren't available yet; the code is auto-generated.

Recruiting through a panel (User Interviews, etc.)

Panels and recruitment tools track who completed your study by passing a unique code through the link. SortedResearch supports this out of the box.

1. In your recruitment tool, use your normal participant link (…/s/XXXXXXXXXX) as the task URL. The tool tacks a tracking code onto it, e.g. …/s/XXXXXXXXXX?iid=pp_123456.
2. Copy the redirect (completion) link the tool gives you — for User Interviews it looks like https://www.userinterviews.com/project-task-events/custom_link_with_redirect/complete?iid=TRACKINGID.
3. Paste that link, exactly as given, into Redirect URL on completion in your study's Settings. Leave the word TRACKINGID in place.

When a participant finishes, SortedResearch reads the tracking code from the link they arrived on and swaps it into the redirect in place of TRACKINGID, so the tool credits the right person automatically. Nothing else to configure per study.

Sourcing participants from PureSpectrum

PureSpectrum is a survey sample marketplace: a place to buy targeted survey respondents on demand. SortedResearch handles the full round trip automatically, so there's no redirect URL to paste. It works the same for a card sort or a pairwise study.

Who can use it

Buying participants from PureSpectrum isn't generally available yet. It's switched on per account and is currently limited to SortedResearch's own accounts while we finish building it. If you don't see Buy them from PureSpectrum under Where participants come from, that's why. Everything below describes how it works for the accounts that have it.

Choose where participants come from

Every study picks one source, under Where participants come from in its settings:

• I'll recruit them. Anyone with the participant link can take part. This is the default, and it's what every account uses today.
• Buy them from PureSpectrum. Only respondents PureSpectrum sends are let in. Shown only on accounts that have PureSpectrum switched on.

A study uses one or the other, never both. If it mixed them, people arriving through your own link would use up the responses you paid PureSpectrum for, and your order could never fill. Once a study has collected a response the setting locks, because that response came from one source. Set up a new study if you need the other one. Opening your own link to check it doesn't lock anything: only a completed response does.

Setting up a PureSpectrum study

Set Where participants come from to PureSpectrum first, then paste your normal participant link into PureSpectrum as the survey entry URL. The order matters: if the study is still set to your own link, PureSpectrum's respondents are turned away at the door and your order can never fill. We email you if we spot that happening.

Don't share that link with anyone else. On a PureSpectrum study, everyone who didn't come from PureSpectrum is turned away.

If PureSpectrum is paused

We can stop PureSpectrum across the whole platform if something goes wrong with the panel. While it's stopped, no new study can be set to PureSpectrum, and any order in field stops letting new people in: they're handed straight back to PureSpectrum, so nobody is left stranded and PureSpectrum stops sending them.

Your data and your money are safe either way. Anyone already part-way through a study finishes it as normal and is still paid, responses already collected stay exactly as they are, and your PureSpectrum responses to review panel keeps working, so you can still approve or reject held responses while it's paused. Your study settings stay editable too. When it's switched back on, the order carries on filling.

PureSpectrum sends respondents to your link with a transaction code attached, and when each respondent finishes, SortedResearch sends them straight back to PureSpectrum with the right outcome:

• Completed for a clean response, so PureSpectrum records the complete.
• Screened out when they don't pass your screener.
• Quota full when your study has already hit its target.
• Quality when the response looks too rushed or careless to keep. This tells PureSpectrum to field a replacement.

Reviewing questionable responses

SortedResearch checks every response for quality. A clean response goes back to PureSpectrum as complete right away. A questionable one is held for you to review, and shows up in a PureSpectrum responses to review panel at the top of the Results tab.

For each held response you can:

• Approve it, which sends it to PureSpectrum as a complete.
• Reject & replace it, which sends it back as low quality so PureSpectrum supplies a fresh respondent. The rejected response is removed from your results straight away: it stops counting toward your responses and its answers no longer affect your scores, so you're left with the replacement rather than both.

Anything you don't get to is approved automatically after 15 days, so your study always fills. You get the quality control of a managed panel without having to babysit it.

How your target is counted

Your target responses counts the responses actually delivered to PureSpectrum. A response you reject frees its slot again, so PureSpectrum's replacement respondent can take it and you still end up with the full number you ordered. A response held for your review doesn't block the study from filling either. The same applies to any demographic quotas you set in the screener, so a replacement respondent isn't turned away on the way in by a slot the rejected response was still holding.

If your study already reached its target while a response was still held, approving it would mean paying for one more respondent than you ordered. SortedResearch returns that response to PureSpectrum as quota full instead, so you're never billed past your target.

This only applies to studies sourced from PureSpectrum. A study you recruit yourself counts every completed response, exactly as before.

Who's active right now

The dashboard header shows a live "active now" count: how many participants are mid-study at this moment across your studies, updated every few seconds (hover for the per-study breakdown). A participant counts as active while they're on the screener or sort and has been seen in the last ~90 seconds. It's mainly a heads-up before making changes, so you don't disrupt anyone in the middle of sorting.

Editing a live study

While a study is live you can freely edit: participant instructions, the thank-you and study-full messages, redirect URL, consent text, privacy URL, target responses, and the screener. You can also add or change cards and categories, but be aware that changing them mid-study can make responses harder to compare.

Two things lock once a study has responses. The sort type (open/closed/hybrid), because changing it would change what the sorts you have already collected mean; and where participants come from (your own link versus a PureSpectrum panel, covered above), because those responses came from one source. Both can still be changed on a live study that has no responses yet, and opening your own link to check it doesn't count, only a completed response locks them.