EAB vs User Intuition: Student Research and Pricing

EAB’s Strategic Advisory Services combine research, expert consultation, benchmarking and implementation support. Its broader portfolio includes systems for managing student relationships and campus workflows. That scope suits institutions that need an ongoing partner or an operational platform alongside research.

User Intuition’s education research workflow starts with the local question. An adult-learning program might investigate why interested applicants do not enroll, exploring schedules, family commitments and expectations of career value. The institution can use those accounts to decide which change is worth testing with its own audience.

An interview can reconstruct the moment a learner postponed an application, missed a requirement or considered stopping out. The moderator follows the participant’s explanation into competing responsibilities and alternatives, so an initial answer such as “the timing was wrong” can become a concrete account of what made participation impractical.

User Intuition’s laddering approach is informed by Reynolds and Gutman’s laddering method, which connects product attributes to consequences and personal values. For adult learners, a timetable problem may threaten reliable childcare, paid work or the confidence that completing the course is feasible. Understanding those consequences helps an institution choose between changing scheduling, clarifying support or redesigning how learners progress through the program.

Institutions can bring their own students, applicants or alumni into a User Intuition study. Recruiting from a specific campus or program is best planned around the audience the institution can reach; specialist external audiences require a recruiting quote. Interviews run in parallel as your participants respond.

Concurrent interviewing helps a team compare experiences across programs or learner groups while preserving the context behind each account. An institution can keep the learning goals consistent and allow participants to explain their own constraints, then assess whether a proposed intervention addresses the experiences that matter most.

User Intuition charges $30 per quality voice interview, with any incentives for the institution’s own participants arranged separately. A research team can investigate a specific enrollment or student-experience question, examine the accounts and fund a follow-up when an unresolved issue could change the recommended action.

EAB’s Navigate360 combines student data, communications and workflows such as appointments, alerts and surveys. That operational purchase serves a different need from commissioning five new interviews. Institutions can use direct research to inform the interventions they manage through their existing systems.

A useful student interview needs enough context to explain a decision. User Intuition checks that the conversation develops substantive detail and covers the brief before charging, helping the institution spend its interview budget on accounts that can inform a specific support or program change.

EAB’s research and operational tools support institutional analysis and student engagement. User Intuition’s billing protection applies to the individual interviews it conducts. Evidence review then examines whether those accounts support the proposed action, including different learner circumstances and explanations that could lead the institution toward a different intervention.

User Intuition’s evidence review is informed by Malterud et al.’s information power framework and Hennink et al.’s meaning-saturation research. These approaches connect sample adequacy to relevant information and distinguish identifying a theme from understanding it in depth. For institutional research, User Intuition uses these principles to assess whether the recommendation reflects the experiences relevant to the program decision. It can recommend deeper analysis of existing accounts or targeted interviews with a learner group whose circumstances are missing from the explanation.

A shopper study illustrates how this evidence review works. We interviewed 43 Walmart shoppers to understand purchase decisions, trip friction and return intent. Thirty-six said they would shop at Walmart again. User Intuition recommends recontacting shoppers after their next comparable trip and comparing those who returned with those who chose another store. The follow-up tests which experiences turn stated intent into a store choice. Explore the Walmart study, two recommended follow-ups and sample presentation.

Navigate360’s AI capabilities help staff and students act within an institution’s support system. User Intuition’s agentic research workflow helps a research team investigate why a particular experience is creating friction and what a useful response would need to address.

For example, an assistant can prepare a study about why admitted adult learners delay enrolling despite expressing strong interest. Researchers review the audience, plan and cost before launch. The findings then connect the proposed change to participants’ accounts and identify which question needs further investigation before expanding the intervention.

User Intuition builds synthetic participants from real, opted-in respondents, using their individual traits, habits and behaviors. It repeatedly compares synthetic responses with the same respondents’ real answers to calibrate the models. That grounding preserves differences in experience and priorities that generic LLM feedback tends to flatten.

This design is informed by Park et al. (2024). Their simulations of 1,052 people reproduced General Social Survey answers 85% as accurately as those people reproduced their own answers two weeks later. The study informs User Intuition’s emphasis on individual grounding and repeated calibration. For education research, individual grounding helps explore why the same schedule or promise could feel practical to one learner and unworkable to another, improving the specificity of follow-up questions.