October 15, 2025
October 15, 2025
SmallPDF is a Switzerland-based company with over a billion users that offers solutions to PDF problems.
As the sole UX researcher at SmallPDF, Daniela Victorino carried the responsibility of both leading strategic research and enabling designers to run their own usability studies. This made scalability a major challenge. Without support, research initiatives were limited to very few projects per quarter. Enter Dscout.
It wasn’t just scalability that caused issues. Recruiting was also a persistent bottleneck—particularly when it came to finding niche audiences.
Most recently, Daniela’s team needed to speak with companies that had purchased PDF software within the past year, segmented by company size. Recruiting this audience manually was time-intensive and often unreliable.
Before Dscout, Daniela also had to piece together her workflow across multiple platforms. She used four different tools for the following:
The disjointed tools meant juggling participant emails, sending and tracking NDAs manually, recording conversations outside of her research tools, and then downloading and re-uploading files just to start analysis. The process was fragmented, time-consuming, and left gaps—like no single place to recruit and run studies end-to-end.
Daniela’s team wanted to grow their continuous discovery program. But with all the fragmented tools the team was using—and with Daniela as the sole UX researcher on the team—their capacity to conduct continuous discovery was severely limited.
Daniela leaned on Dscout to embed continuous discovery across her team and scale the volume of projects the team was able to conduct. With Dscout’s help, she onboarded four designers and one product manager onto the platform, enabling them to run unmoderated usability testing while she provided guidance and oversight. That translated into talking to customers every week orevery two weeks instead of only a few times a quarter.
“I'm really happy that I can now do everything [recruiting, scheduling, conducting research] within one platform, rather than having to do all the manual work.”
When SmallPDF needed to reach niche participants, Daniela turned to Dscout’s Partner Panels. Instead of relying on manual recruitment or juggling multiple vendors, she was able to access high-quality participants who matched precise criteria, such as company size, role, and recency of purchase.
Designers used Dscout for self-service usability testing, multiplying research across the organization. Partner Panels also helped find rare participant profiles, like IT decision makers and recent B2B buyers. “The quality [of participants] was really good,” said Daniela. “I would describe it as my best partner for niche audiences that in the past I thought it was almost impossible to find.”
By combining continuous discovery with Dscout’s Partner Panels, Daniela’s team scaled research output and increased leadership confidence in the process.
“[Dscout’s Partner Panels] makes my life so much easier to work with these kinds of requests…I can say yes, for sure, no worries, we will find those people.”
After using Dscout and Dscout’s Partner Panels, the designers on Daniela’s team are more equipped to conduct research with niche participants that are typically difficult to source. And by saving time through eliminating multiple platforms and manual work processes, there’s even more bandwidth to focus on the high-priority tasks ahead.