Concept and Usability Testing With AI Moderation

Discuss gives consumer packaged goods teams one platform to evaluate concepts, observe product use, and follow up with consumers. Researchers can test product and packaging ideas and investigate how consumers use physical products in homes and stores. Discuss combines AI interviews, human moderation, and self-paced activities within the same research program.

Testing Product Ideas and Physical-Product Use

CPG teams use Discuss to investigate both the appeal of an idea and the experience of using a physical product. Concept feedback helps researchers understand reactions to proposed products or packaging; in-context research captures how consumers interact with products and explain their experiences in everyday settings.

For concept work, researchers can share stimuli in live sessions or add photos and videos to AI interviews. Live-session polls and whiteboarding, alongside embedded closed-ended tasks, give teams additional ways to explore reactions and preferences.

Physical-product studies help researchers identify where consumers struggle during use, rather than treating general product sentiment as usability feedback. Participants can show their environment and describe what they are doing, while diaries and longitudinal activities capture experiences beyond a single conversation.

Combining AI Interviews and Human Follow-Up

AI and human moderation work together on Discuss within the same project, with consistent synthesis and reporting across both. Teams can begin with AI-led interviews and invite selected participants into live follow-ups, or start with human-led conversations and use AI interviews to extend the research.

The AI Interviewer follows study objectives and adapts its probing to participant responses and the context researchers provide. Human moderators remain available when researchers want to guide an exploratory conversation or investigate a finding in greater depth.

HelloFresh combines weekly AI-moderated in-home ethnography on Discuss with human moderation for work including some concept testing and shop-alongs, where the team values a skilled moderator’s judgment in the moment.

Self-paced activities add another way to collect feedback on the participant’s schedule. The method choice stays with the researcher: the platform supports a mix rather than requiring every study to use the same format.

Consumer Brands Test Assumptions and Expand Research

Consumer brands use Discuss to test assumptions about products and learn from people’s experiences using them. Lycored used taste testing to understand reactions to food coloring, Reckitt moved hands-on product testing online, and HelloFresh expanded its in-home research program with AI moderation while retaining human-led methods.

• Lycored: Discuss’ consumer taste-testing study with Lycored challenged the assumption that brighter food colors appeal more to consumers. In live conversations about gummy bears, children emphasized taste, while mothers associated muted colors with healthier food. Those perceptions informed product messaging; they were not nutritional findings.
• HelloFresh: Using Discuss, the team shifted from occasional in-person ethnography to weekly AI-moderated research, with respondents per study increasing from 6 to 18 and country/language coverage from 3 to 10. Its team shares weekly highlight reels so stakeholders can hear and see consumer experiences directly.
• Reckitt: Discuss supported remote product testing with Reckitt when pandemic restrictions disrupted in-person research. Participants could touch, feel, and test physical products, with Discuss handling respondent management and helping set up the research. The example shows that moving research online need not mean evaluating products only through images.

Forrester™ named Discuss a Leader in its Q1 2026 evaluation of experience research platforms. The report highlights live interview capabilities and AI support across the research process, providing analyst recognition alongside the customer examples.

Running Product Studies Across Markets

Product studies on Discuss can reach consumer audiences through integrated panel partners in more than 150 countries, and teams can bring their own participants. The AI Interviewer conducts conversations in more than 50 languages, while professional services can support recruitment, coordination, and fieldwork for teams that need additional help.

Discussion guides translate with one click for multi-market deployment. Transcripts and live translation services are available in more than 100 languages, helping stakeholders follow research conducted in languages they do not speak.

Quantifying Feedback and Tracing Consumer Evidence

Product feedback becomes more useful when teams can inspect both the patterns and the consumer responses behind them. Discuss’ AI analysis organizes open-ended feedback into themes with counts and percentages, while Discuss Intelligence returns answers with supporting verbatims traced to the original participant, segment, and video clip.

Researchers can embed ranking, single-select, and multi-select tasks within qualitative activities. Discuss’ multichannel survey capabilities provide another way to collect quantitative evidence; theme counts from interviews should not be presented as population-wide preference estimates.

Using Past Research to Prepare New Concept Studies

Consumer research on Discuss can inform the next product question as well as the current study. Discuss Intelligence lets team members query the organization’s research library in plain language, identifies relevant studies, and returns source-traced answers across qualitative research and quantitative open-ended responses, with context from the underlying evidence.

Teams use prior research to ground a new concept in what consumers have already shared. Discuss’ research-based Virtual Personas also help teams explore a proposed concept and refine its discussion guide before fieldwork. Fresh consumer research then establishes how people respond to the product itself.