Bailey Klein is a UX research studio with eight researchers supporting fintech and health-tech clients. Their work is almost entirely conversation — stakeholder kickoffs, moderated usability sessions, synthesis workshops, and readouts. Before 2026, insight quality was high but traceability was not. A finding in a deck might cite "Interview 7" with no easy path back to the exact moment a participant hesitated on a checkout flow.
From field notes to verifiable evidence
Principal researcher Daniel Bailey wanted clients to trust findings without asking researchers to re-watch hours of video. The studio tried transcription vendors that required upload pipelines and separate logins — fine for legal review, too heavy for a two-week sprint. They standardized on Scriba for every client-facing call: kickoff, interviews, debriefs, and final readouts. Onboarding a new researcher now includes a thirty-minute walkthrough of the project archive instead of a folder of orphaned MP4 files.
Clients don't pay us for transcripts. They pay us for judgment. But judgment without receipts erodes trust the moment someone asks, 'Did anyone actually say that?'
The workflow they run today
Each study gets a Scriba project linking all related meetings. Researchers tag contacts for participants and stakeholders so names resolve consistently across sessions. During moderated tests, the facilitator keeps Scriba running locally — audio stays on the researcher's Mac, which matters for healthcare clients with strict data-handling addenda.
- Kickoff calls: chat summaries capture scope, success metrics, and out-of-bounds topics.
- Interviews: transcript search replaces manual timestamp hunting in recordings.
- Internal debriefs: meeting memory rolls up themes before synthesis workshops.
- Readouts: researchers pull verbatim quotes directly from searchable transcripts.
Impact on deliverables and client trust
Synthesis workshops shortened because researchers arrived with AI-assisted theme lists drawn from prior debriefs instead of raw sticky notes. Final reports now include deep links to transcript moments — not video files clients struggle to navigate. One fintech client reused Bailey Klein's Scriba archive during a regulatory audit to show user-testing covered specific disclosure language, without the studio re-running sessions.
We used to lose a day per study just reconciling who said what across spreadsheets and Miro boards. Now the meeting is the source of truth, and the deck cites it.
Lessons for research ops
Bailey Klein's rule: if a conversation can change a recommendation, it gets recorded. They still use dedicated video capture for task-based usability when screen recording is required — Scriba handles the spoken layer. For a research studio selling rigor, searchable transcripts turned out to be the fastest way to make rigor visible.