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Berkay is a UX researcher with over eight years of experience, mostly in e-commerce and banking, working across both B2B and B2C. He has a bachelor's and a master's degree in product design and design research. His focus is on turning research into actionable insights, improving research processes and helping teams make user-centered decisions. Basically, reducing uncertainty. He also co-founded UXR Playground, Turkey’s leading UX platform, where he runs trainings, workshops and mentorship programs. In a past role, he built and led a ResearchOps team, creating systems to make research more efficient and scalable.
In our conversation, we discuss:
The eight-step framework Berkay uses for smooth, ethical participant recruitment, built from actual interviews and field work.
Why many researchers are flying blind with recruitment and how junior researchers often end up as accidental call center reps.
The most common screw-ups in screener surveys and how to write questions that don’t sabotage your study before it starts.
How Berkay built a participant panel inside a 30-million-user company without a budget, and with legal breathing down his neck.
Why most panels fall apart after setup, and what to actually prioritize if you want yours to last longer than three studies.
Some takeaways:
Ethics aren’t optional. If you’re collecting personal data, you’re responsible for what happens to it. Berkay shares how one company got sued after leaking participant emails. It’s not a footnote, it’s a risk. Build ethics and legal compliance into your process from day one, or you’ll learn the hard way.
Most companies are bad at recruitment and fixing it takes more than tools. Berkay got so fed up with watching junior researchers waste hours cold-calling participants that he turned the whole thing into a research study. The findings? A total lack of structure, zero shared frameworks, and a ton of internal guesswork pretending to be process.
Bad screener surveys kill good research. Asking “Do you use this app?” is a great way to recruit liars. Berkay shares simple but smart ways to avoid bias in screeners like using multi-select questions, hiding the research topic, and adding duplicate questions to sniff out lazy responses.
Building a panel sounds smart until you have to maintain it. Setting up a panel is the easy part. The real challenge is keeping the data clean, staying GDPR-compliant, and making participants feel like they’re still part of something. Regular outreach (like quarterly surveys) and strong ties to your data team are non-negotiable.
A good panel is a cross-team operation. Berkay didn’t just build a landing page and hope for the best. He brought in product, customer support, PMs, and data science from the start. If you want a panel that works across research needs and methods, it has to be owned across the company too.
Where to find Berkay:
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The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the host, the podcast, or any affiliated organizations or sponsors.
