Search your user interview recordings for the quote that makes the case

Where user research gets stuck

Running the sessions is the easy part. The recordings pile up in a shared drive, the synthesis happens on sticky notes, and three months later a stakeholder asks whether anyone actually complained about onboarding. You remember someone did. You don't remember who, or which call.

The other recurring request is evidence. A readout lands harder with a participant saying it in their own voice than with a bullet point, but cutting that clip means finding the moment first. Multiply that by every theme in the deck and it is a day of scrubbing.

How teams handle it today

None of these is wrong. The gap is usually the same: finding a remembered idea across every session at once, then getting straight to the second it was said.

• Live notes and a tagging board. Cheap and collaborative, but only as good as the note-taker, and quotes are paraphrased by the time they reach the board.
• Research repository platforms. Good at tagging and sharing across a team. Recordings are uploaded to the vendor, which may need a data processing review, and the cost scales with seats.
• Meeting-tool transcripts. Free with the call, but scattered across accounts and usually searchable only by exact words, one recording at a time.

A MediaFind workflow for a study

Ask, the on-device assistant, can take a question like “what did participants say about the pricing page?” and answer with the files and timestamps it used. It is a fast first pass over the whole study, not a substitute for your synthesis.

1. Put each study's recordings in its own folder and add it to MediaFind. While the app is open it checks that folder about once a minute and indexes new sessions once they finish copying.
2. Add product names, feature names and competitor names to the names and terms list so they are spelled right in transcripts.
3. Name each participant's voice once. Speaker labels are free, and a named voice is recognized in their other sessions; unsure matches stay unnamed.
4. Search by meaning, for example “confused about where to find billing settings,” and scan ranked moments from every session, each linked to its timestamp.
5. Play each hit in context before you quote it, then tag the sessions that support a theme and save the search.

Usability sessions are screen recordings too

In a usability test, what the participant saw often matters as much as what they said. MediaFind indexes the text on screen in video frames, so you can search for a page title, an error message or a button label and land on the moment it appeared. See searchable screen recordings for more on that side.

Photos of whiteboards and affinity maps from a synthesis workshop are searchable by the words in them, and a folder of Markdown research notes can come in through Memory so notes and recordings show up in the same search.

From quote to readout

Found the moment? Cut it out as a clip from the result, or drop it into Create, the built-in timeline editor, to trim it, burn in captions and render an MP4 for the deck. Transcripts export as Word, PDF, SRT, VTT or text for anyone who prefers reading.

With Pro, highlights and reels can stitch every moment about a topic or tag across the study into one video, which is a quick way to build a theme montage for a readout. The highlight reel guide walks through it.

Consent and participant privacy

Participants agreed to be recorded for a purpose, and your consent form probably says who can see the recordings and for how long. MediaFind processes everything on your computer with no account and no upload, so indexing a study does not add a new vendor to that list. After the one-time model download it works offline.

That does not settle retention or sharing on its own. Clips you export and send are copies, so treat them the way your consent terms require, and remove sessions from the library when the retention period ends. If you connect a cloud AI assistant over MCP, the results it asks for go to that assistant, so leave it off for participant data.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search across all my usability sessions at once?

Yes. Add the study folder and MediaFind indexes every recording in it. A search by meaning returns ranked moments from all sessions, each linked to its timestamp.

Does MediaFind replace a research repository?

Not for team-wide tagging and sharing. It is a private way to transcribe, search and clip your own recordings, and it exports transcripts and clips you can bring into whatever your team uses.

Can I tell the participant apart from the moderator?

Yes. Speaker labels separate voices, and you can name each one. Name a voice once and it is recognized in other recordings; check labels where people talk over each other.

Are participant recordings uploaded anywhere?

No. Transcription, search and Ask run on your computer with no account. The only network use on the core path is the one-time model download.