Empowering Academic Researchers: The Story Behind nQuerio

Four years ago, nQuerio didn’t exist.

It started with a simple observation, one that kept coming back every time I watched my wife work.

She’s a professor in social psychology. Like many researchers, she relied on tools like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey to design and run her studies. Powerful tools, no doubt. But something always felt… off.

They weren’t built for research. They were built for surveys. And that distinction matters.

A Frustration That Turned Into a Question

As a UI/UX designer and developer, I started noticing the friction.

Things that should have been simple were complicated.

Things that were critical for research were missing or awkward to implement.

• Pairing participants in dyadic studies required workarounds
• Anonymization had to be carefully managed outside the platform
• Exporting clean, analysis-ready datasets was more manual than it should be
• Longitudinal designs felt like they were fighting the tool instead of being supported by it

So I asked a simple question: What if there was a platform built specifically for academic research, from the ground up?

Not adapted. Not repurposed. Built for it.

Testing the Idea in the Wild

In November 2021, I posted on Reddit. I wasn’t pitching a product. I didn’t have one. I was testing a hypothesis. Would researchers even want this? The response surprised me. Researchers shared frustrations I hadn’t even considered. Others encouraged the idea. Many said the same thing in different ways: “Yes. Please build this.”

That post ended with a small survey. Hundreds of responses later, the signal was clear. This wasn’t just a personal frustration. It was a systemic gap.

The Turning Point: Meeting Charles-Étienne

For a while, the idea stayed just that, an idea. Then, everything accelerated.

At the SQRP (Société Québécoise pour la recherche en psychologie) convention, I overheard someone speaking passionately about the exact same problem.

He was a PhD candidate, deeply immersed in research methodology, and he was describing, almost word for word, the platform I had in mind. That was Charles-Étienne Lavoie.

I introduced myself. We talked. And very quickly, it became obvious: This wasn’t a coincidence. It was alignment.

On September 29, 2022, we decided to build nQuerio together.

Building With Researchers, Not Just For Them

From day one, our goal was not to replicate existing tools. It was to rethink them. We asked ourselves: What would a survey platform look like if it truly respected the realities of academic research?

That question led to core principles that still guide us today:

Privacy-first, by design

Participant data and research data should never be casually mixed. Anonymization isn’t a feature, it’s a foundation.

Native support for research designs

Dyads, longitudinal studies, reminders, retries… These aren’t edge cases. They’re central.

Clean data, ready for analysis

Researchers shouldn’t spend hours cleaning exports. Your dataset should be usable the moment you download it.

Respect for ethical standards

From consent flows to auditability, the platform should support—not complicate—ethics approvals.

Why We’re Building nQuerio

There are many great survey tools out there. But academic research isn’t just about collecting answers. It’s about:

• rigor
• reproducibility
• ethics
• and trust

We believe researchers deserve tools that reflect that. Not tools that they have to bend to fit their work.

This Is Just the Beginning

nQuerio is still evolving. Every conversation with a researcher shapes what we build next. Every study conducted on the platform teaches us something new. This first post is not a launch announcement. It’s a starting point. A way to share why we’re here, and where this all began. If you’re a researcher and this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Because nQuerio was never meant to be built in isolation. It’s meant to be built with the people it serves.