Every home project begins with a question: Who can I trust to do this right?
Thumbtack exists to answer that question, helping millions of homeowners find and hire the right professionals to maintain, repair, and improve their homes. Behind the scenes, Thumbtack powers a dual-sided marketplace: customers navigating high-stakes home decisions, and pros—from solo plumbers to large service companies—whose livelihoods depend on being discovered, contacted, and hired.
For Thumbtack’s research team, ensuring both sides succeed means understanding far more than funnels and click paths. Priorities span the full spectrum: customer conversion, pro activation and retention, and sentiment-driven signals like trust, confidence, and overall satisfaction at critical decision points.
But while traditional metrics could show where users hesitated, they couldn’t reveal why. The team lacked a scalable, always-on way to capture sentiment inside the product… especially during the emotional moments that shape whether a homeowner moves forward, pauses, or silently abandons the experience.
To illuminate those hidden motivations and build an evergreen measurement program that could scale across multiple journeys, Thumbtack leaned on Sprig.
The Challenge: A Vision for Continuous UX Measurement, Blocked by Engineering Reality
Before Sprig, the research team had only one way to collect in-product insights:
Hard-coded surveys, built and maintained manually by engineers.
That made a continuous UX measurement program impossible. Each new question required competing for engineering time. Updates were slow, costly, and dependent on teams already operating at full capacity. With many researchers and multiple product teams needing signal, hard-coded surveys simply couldn’t keep up.
Yet the team had a clear vision: A holistic, always-on view of journey health that blended:
- Event-triggered sentiment
- Behavioral logs
- Journey-level KPIs
- And qualitative insights at scale
Thumbtack needed an off-the-shelf solution that was powerful enough for in-product sentiment, flexible enough to adapt across journeys, and researcher-owned after a one-time integration.
That’s where Sprig entered the picture.
Why Thumbtack Chose Sprig
Sprig changed the equation by offering:
- Event-based in product-surveys that run at the exact moment of user intent
- Researcher-owned workflows after one-time engineering integration
- Seamless design that feels native in Thumbtack’s product
- Figma integration for quick, unmoderated prototype testing
Over time, Sprig spread organically across research teams, transforming how product decisions were informed and measured.
A Closer Look: Why Users Drop Off Before Contacting a Pro
One of Thumbtack’s earliest and most impactful uses of Sprig targeted a deceptively simple question:
Why do customers start contacting a pro… but abandon the process before sending their request?
On the surface, this looked like a typical funnel drop-off. But the stakes behind it were anything but typical. These are homeowners who:
- Search for a pro
- Begin filling out the request form
- Then stop, right before the moment of contact
Traditional metrics only showed the what.
Sprig enabled the team to uncover the why.
What Sprig Revealed: It Wasn’t Just “Abandonment”
Sprig’s event-triggered intercept surfaced insights that surprised even seasoned researchers:
- A large portion of customers weren’t abandoning out of frustration. They simply weren’t ready to hire yet
- Many still had a high likelihood of returning to Thumbtack
- Homeowners wanted more time to gather information before committing
- Some didn’t expect the depth of questions being sent to pros
- Others hit technical clarity issues or needed reassurance
In short:
Hiring a pro is often a multi-session decision, not a one-and-done funnel. High-cost projects with hundreds or thousands on the price tag prompt homeowners to research, compare, and return later with more confidence.
Thumbtack’s product wasn’t yet optimized for homeowners returning after this pause.
Turning Insight Into Action: Redesigning Thumbtack’s Front Door
Equipped with a clearer understanding of early-stage customer needs, the team redesigned the below-the-fold homepage experience to better support visitors in the consideration phase.
They then extended this work by using Sprig to run an off-product A/B/C/D prototype test of four homepage concepts. By randomizing users into different variations, the team was able to pinpoint which visual cues, messaging patterns, and layout choices most effectively conveyed trust and value to top-of-funnel visitors. These insights helped refine the final direction before investing in a full build or live A/B test.
Sprig became:
- The discovery mechanism
- The validation instrument
- The ongoing signal that supported whether the redesigned experience actually improved user sentiment
This discover → redesign → validate loop is now a core pattern in Thumbtack’s product workflow.
Beyond One Study: How Sprig Became a Foundation for UX Measurement
What began as a small pilot evolved into an org-wide insights engine supporting research across Thumbtack.
Three major shifts emerged:
1. Sentiment Metrics Became Part of Roadmaps
Product teams began including Sprig-based sentiment goals (e.g confidence, trust, satisfaction) directly in planning documents and success criteria.
2. Insights Spanned Both Prototypes and Live Experiences
Researchers now run lightweight usability tests and in-product surveys in one place, making insight capture faster and more connected.
3. A Strong Operational Model Emerged
To avoid over-surveying and coordinate across teams, Thumbtack created a survey working group, shared engineering guidelines, and separated survey completes into two streams:
- Ad hoc research
- Evergreen tracking
This structure allowed Sprig to function as an always-on insights engine.
The Cultural Shift: Product Teams Ask for Sprig Now
One of the biggest unexpected outcomes?
Product teams now proactively request Sprig surveys.
Product managers ask where sentiment should be measured. Designers use intercepts to shape early flows. Leaders expect UX metrics alongside conversion metrics in quarterly updates.
Sprig went from a research pilot to a cross-functional planning tool in less than a year.
Advice from Thumbtack’s Research Team
For teams adopting Sprig, Thumbtack recommends:
- Aligning early pilots to product team goals. This unlocks engineering support
- Designing pilot studies with evergreen potential
- Building ops early. Demand will grow fast
- Making sentiment metrics part of planning rather than just reporting
Thumbtack’s Outcome: A Scalable, Always-On Insights Engine
Today, Sprig powers:
- Continuous measurement across multiple key moments
- Faster discovery and validation
- Consistent sentiment tracking
- Richer understanding of both customer and pro experiences
For a marketplace built on trust and confidence, this always-on signal is now a strategic advantage.
