🚀 In the simplest terms - and for the purposes of your "session count," a session can be thought of as a single recording with a single participant.
A Session is one completed interaction with one person, from start to finish.
In Lookback, sessions are the atomic unit of qualitative evidence. Everything else - recordings, findings, themes, reels, and AI-assisted insights - ultimately traces back to sessions.
Understanding what counts as a session is essential to understanding how Lookback works.
A session is an occasion in time
A session is the occasion when a research interaction takes place, whether it is:
moderated or unmoderated
remote or in person
conducted by a researcher or guided by AI
A session begins when the interaction starts and ends when it finishes (not counting reconnects).
Each completed interaction with one participant counts as one session.
Sessions are captured in real time - and available for replay
Lookback is a qualitative research platform. That means sessions are not just live events - they are recorded evidence.
Every session:
streams live while it is happening (even if it is unmoderated)
can be replayed later for review and analysis
The ability to return to sessions and examine what actually happened is core to how Lookback supports qualitative understanding.
What a session contains
A session includes all captured activity associated with that interaction, including (depending on method and device):
screen recordings
audio
video (such as participant face camera, when available)
touches, taps, and gestures (on supported iOS and Android setups)
time-stamped notes
researcher and observer chat
transcriptions
findings created from the session
Everything that is recorded during - or created in direct relation to - that interaction belongs to the session.
Sessions are evidence, not conclusions
A session shows:
what someone did
what they said
where they hesitated or struggled
the context they were in
A session does not tell you what to conclude.
Meaning emerges later, through interpretation, comparison, and synthesis across multiple sessions.
This separation between evidence (sessions) and insight (findings and themes) is intentional.
How sessions relate to Projects and Rounds
Sessions always live within a Round, which in turn lives within a Project:
Projects define what you are trying to understand
Rounds describe how you are learning at a particular moment
Sessions capture what actually happened
This structure keeps evidence grounded while allowing research to evolve.
Sessions and limits: how sessions are counted
In plans that include session limits or quotas, a session is counted as:
the real-time interaction plus its recorded output
Each completed interaction counts as one session, regardless of method.
Example: diary studies
If you are running a diary study:
each participant entry counts as one session
a diary study with 5 participants completing 5 entries each results in 25 sessions
This reflects the fact that each entry is a distinct interaction and produces its own evidence.
What sessions do not include
To avoid confusion:
Sessions do not include participant recruitment
Recruiting participants is handled separately and may involve additional or parallel costs
Sessions refer only to the recorded research interactions themselves.
What sessions are not
A session is not a meeting
A session is not a report
A session is not an insight on its own
A session is evidence - nothing more, nothing less.
Why this matters
By treating sessions as the atomic unit of evidence, Lookback encourages:
staying close to raw material
resisting premature conclusions
grounding decisions in what people actually did and said
AI can help surface patterns and reduce cognitive load, but understanding still begins with sessions.
What to explore next
To continue building your mental model:
Learn what is recorded in a session and what varies by method or device
Explore how findings are created from sessions
Understand how Rounds and Projects support learning over time