Ask any researcher or designer about recruitment, and they’ll likely tell you how difficult it is to find the right users. How do you find participants who are not only available but relevant to what you’re studying? Too often, we start each project from scratch, having to hunt for participants anew.

A well-designed user panel changes that dynamic. When built intentionally, a panel becomes the backbone of sustainable research: speeding up recruiting, increasing consistency, and deepening relationships with users over time.

What Is a User Panel?

A user panel (also known as a research panel, internal participant database, in-house panel, or customer research group) is a curated group of people, usually customers or target users, who’ve opted in to participate in future research opportunities.

The distinguishing features are consent and continuity: participants agree to future contact, and your organization can re-engage them for studies.

But more than that, a panel functions as infrastructure, not just a list. It connects fragmented recruiting efforts across teams, serves as a living asset, and supports consistency in the research process. This foundation helps ensure that user input isn’t limited to isolated projects but becomes a steady part of how decisions are made — an important marker of higher UX maturity.

We spoke with UX practitioners who have developed such internal research panels. In this article, we discuss considerations for creating a research panel, along with tips, tricks, and lessons learned — all shared by these researchers.

When Does a User Panel Help?

Finding the right participants for each study often requires more coordination than the research itself. Even when other teams, such as marketing or customer success, have direct contact with customers, relying on them for every recruiting need creates delays and inconsistencies.

An internal research panel enables researchers to be nimble with their research, spinning up small studies when they need quick insights. A dedicated UX research panel and a systematized approach to recruiting also enable researchers to be efficient in recruiting participants across all types of research studies.

There are three significant benefits of these centralized internal research panels: saving time, saving money, and building your relationship with your customers.

Saving Time

When a panel is effectively implemented, it can add cohesion to the scattered contact lists that the researchers, sales teams, and product managers have. Recruitment often accounts for a large share of project timelines. When participants are prescreened, organized, and willing, setup time drops dramatically.

For example, an experienced researcher reported that the no-show rate dropped by 20% when the organization switched to their internal panel. The research team was able to stop overrecruiting for studies as a result.

Saving Money

External recruiting with professional recruiters or platforms can be very expensive. Panels also minimize hidden costs, like extensive screening, thousands of dollars in vendor fees, and researcher time lost to coordination. Over time, this efficiency compounds: teams spend less money on finding participants and more on analyzing and applying insights.

Balancing Benefits with Limitations

Internal panels are powerful, but they come with tradeoffs. Because most members already know your product, they won’t always reflect the perspectives of new or unfamiliar users. Participants who have a long-standing relationship with the brand may unintentionally offer feedback that is more positive or more specific to their own usage patterns.

That said, the key is fit. Panels are most effective when you require recurring access to a defined audience, rather than when exploring broad or unfamiliar markets. For discovery or competitive research, external recruiting agencies and participant-matching tools can complement your panel by expanding reach and diversity.

It’s not a choice between internal panels and external recruiting; many teams use both. A panel offers speed and familiarity, while external sources add diversity and reach. They can even complement each other within the same study: the panel provides returning customers, and external recruiting brings in new or less-engaged users.

Types of Panels

There are two primary types of internal research panels. Understanding the distinctions will help you plan and build your panel with intention.

Many organizations adopt a hybrid approach, maintaining a base of existing customer participants while recruiting new target users as needed. This enables user panels to operate at various stages of the product cycle, from discovery to evaluation and growth in emerging markets.

Panels can also take different forms depending on the structure of your offering.

B2C companies (like Duolingo) recruit customers who interact directly with their product for rapid feedback from large, diverse audiences. These panels focus on usability, satisfaction, and continuous engagement with everyday users.

B2B companies (like Atlassian) recruit professionals — admins, developers, or team leads — who use their tools for work. These panels emphasize productivity, workflow optimization, depth and domain expertise, and long-term adoption.

Marketplace companies (like Airbnb) maintain panels representing both sides of their ecosystem — hosts and guests, buyers and sellers — because improving one experience often affects the other.

Lastly, a panel’s design often reflects an organization’s UX maturity. Lower-maturity teams may rely on basic spreadsheets to reduce recruiting friction, while more mature organizations develop structured systems with governance, segmentation, and automation. As maturity grows, panels shift from being a research convenience to a shared company asset that connects teams and fosters long-term customer engagement.

Regardless of how panels may differ from company to company, the core purpose remains the same: to facilitate future research more easily and predictably.

6 Steps to Build a User Panel

Building a user panel requires more than just having people sign up; it also involves gathering and analyzing data. There are operational steps that transform your concept of a database into a living system that enables you to hear from your customers.

1. Recruit: Invite users to join your panel through in-product prompts, email outreach, marketing efforts, or community engagement.

2. Organize and segment: Store your opted-in panelists in a system that allows you to track their attributes and contact them later.

3. Contact and schedule: Once you have a study request that your panel can fill, you can invite matches to specific studies.

4. Incentivize and engage: Just as with any participant, you’ll incentivize them appropriately and use the incentive as a way to maintain their motivation and expectations around being panelists.

5. Reengage and manage: Use your system to track their participation history, keep their information up-to-date, and rotate outreach to avoid fatiguing these valued customers.

6. Govern and improve: Establish clear ownership and policies internally for who can access, contact, or update the panel. Governance ensures privacy compliance, consistent communication, and long-term sustainability.

Those owning the panel will need to spend time exploring the best tool for managing their panel.

The practitioners we spoke with used a variety of options for storing and maintaining their panelists’ information.

Specialized Research Platforms

Purpose-built research platforms have expanded rapidly in recent years, providing teams with significantly more support for organizing and running studies than basic tools alone can offer. The practitioners we spoke with praised tools that supported the whole workflow as gamechangers for research efficiency. These tools not only store and organize a database of research participants but also enable researchers to conduct and oversee studies efficiently, thereby simplifying the entire study management process.

UX practitioners highlighted a range of tools, such as:

• UserInterviews Hub (Hosts our NN/G Panel!)
• Participant Kit (previously Consent Kit)
• Ethnio
• dScout
• Great Question
• UX Tweak

This category continues to evolve, with new platforms entering the market regularly and offering different combinations of features.

These tools include automation for screening, scheduling, reminders, and incentive distribution, reducing the need for manual coordination. There’s also the possibility of matching participants to studies, detecting duplicated or over-contacted users, and identifying underrepresented segments.

These platforms tend to be more expensive than general-purpose tools, which means they’re easier for larger or more mature teams to adopt than for smaller groups working with limited budgets.

Customer-Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

Some researchers adapt CRM tools such as Salesforce or HubSpot. Because these systems are designed to manage customer data, they can help structure participant profiles and segmentation early on without requiring budget. However, they usually don’t offer study-management features like consent tracking or scheduling, and sharing with multiple teams can reduce control over panel management.

General Purpose Tools

Many teams without access to specialized tools begin with spreadsheets or other general-purpose tools that are already available to them. These are familiar, inexpensive, and readily available.

Manual panel management increases risks, such as lost records, privacy issues, duplicate contacts, and overlooked panelists, as panel size and complexity grow.

Advocating for Your Own Panel

Signs your organization is ready for its own panel:

• Every project’s recruitment starts from scratch.
• Multiple studies target the same user group.
• Researchers struggle to reach specific customer segments.

There’s an informal way of using sales and product contacts for research participation.

How to Make the Case

Building a panel requires organizational buy-in. When advocating for one, tailor your message to what matters most for your stakeholders:

• Leaders and budget owners care about ROI and efficiency. Emphasize the time and cost saved when recruitment becomes a centralized infrastructure rather than a recurring expense.
• Crossfunctional partners (like marketing or product teams) care about timely access to customers. Demonstrate how a panel fosters a shared view of customers for all teams in the organization and eliminates redundant outreach.
• Legal and compliance teams are concerned with risk and consent. Demonstrate how formalized governance protects both participants and the organization.

Advocating for a panel isn’t just about asking for the budget; it’s also about showing how it strengthens decision making across teams.

Conclusion

Building a panel takes upfront effort, but the payoff is substantial. Once the system is in place, researchers can conduct studies more efficiently, recruit participants more consistently, and allocate more time to generating insights instead of searching for them.

Sign Up for the NN/G UX-Practitioner Research Panel

Thank you to the researchers and product managers who shared their experience with us for this article. These practitioners were contacted through our own NN/G UX-Practitioner Research Panel, which is hosted through UserInterviews Hub.

If you’re interested in contributing to future NN/G research with UX practitioners, you can join our participant community. Your input helps shape the guidance and frameworks we create for the UX field. If you are interested in participating in research with us in the future, please sign up here.