How Lookback Organizes Research

Lookback is designed around a simple idea: qualitative research is about understanding why, not just collecting outputs.

To support that, Lookback organizes research in a way that reflects how real qualitative learning happens over time - not as isolated tests, but as an ongoing process of inquiry, evidence, and shared understanding.

This structure is intentional. It shapes how research is conducted, how evidence is interpreted, and how insights remain useful long after a single session ends.

At the highest level, Lookback organizes research into three structural layers:

Each layer serves a distinct purpose. Together, they form a model that supports iterative, qualitative learning rather than one-off studies.

This structure exists independently of specific methods, devices, or workflows. It is the backbone of how research is organized and how evidence accumulates over time.

A Project is the long-lived container for a research question, product area, or initiative.

Projects are designed to persist. They are not tied to a single study or test. Instead, a Project represents the thing you are trying to understand — for example, a product, a feature area, or a strategic problem.

All evidence ultimately lives at the Project level. This allows insights to accumulate, connect, and remain relevant as research evolves.

Within a Project, research is conducted in Rounds.

Rounds exist to support iteration. They allow you to:

Importantly, Rounds do not separate findings. This is by design.

Rounds describe how you are learning at a given moment - not what you ultimately learn. Keeping findings at the Project level ensures that insights remain connected, comparable, and cumulative across time.

A Session is one completed interaction with a participant.

Sessions are the atomic unit of qualitative evidence in Lookback. Each session captures what happened during that interaction - such as video, audio, screen recordings, notes, and timestamps - depending on the research method and device.

Everything else in Lookback builds on Sessions. Findings, themes, reels, and AI-assisted analysis all originate from session data.

Qualitative research is inherently multi-perspective. Lookback is therefore designed around three distinct human roles, each with a purpose-built experience:

These experiences are intentionally asymmetric.

Participants do not see observers.
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Stakeholders cannot disturb or directly influence sessions in real time.
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Researchers work from a control room designed to reduce cognitive load.

These differences are not limitations. They exist to protect research quality, ethics, and evidence integrity.

This model reflects how qualitative research actually works:

By separating structure (Projects), iteration (Rounds), evidence (Sessions), and perspective (roles), Lookback makes it easier to reason about research without losing nuance or continuity.

Lookback is not organized like a video conferencing tool, where sessions are isolated meetings.

It is also not organized like a survey platform, where responses are reduced to rows and columns.

Lookback is a qualitative research system - one where video-based evidence, human judgment, and iterative sense-making remain central, even as AI helps reduce cognitive load.

To go deeper into how Lookback works:

Each of these concepts is covered in more detail in the following articles.