user-research
(19)
Listen Labs and the Question After the Answer
A customer can say “fine” and mean almost anything. Listen Labs built a research business around the next question - and made it possible to ask that question thousands of times.
Product Design: the first version is a question
LaSoft’s product design practice turns business processes into web and mobile software. Its work for OutSail shows why a working first version can be the beginning of the argument.
Next Step knows when fewer leads are better
A behavioral design agency finds growth in the details companies overlook: the wrong prospect, the intimidating message, the feature nobody asked for.
Alon Blum designs the route from looking to doing
Flowers, fitness dashboards and a summer playlist reveal the range of Independent Consultant, Alon Blum’s design practice. The connecting thread is the path a person takes through a digital product.
Pepperplane Makes Software Teams Answer the Expensive Question First
This small, remote design studio has shipped more than 350 projects by insisting that the costly part of software is not the screen. It is the untested assumption underneath it.
Solirius Reply and the hard work behind a simple public service
A court notification can hide a surprisingly large job. Inside the consultancy that helps government teams untangle the work, test the service and make it usable.
Dscout Spent 15 Years Bottling Human Context. Now It Has to Keep AI From Watering It Down.
Dscout escaped the focus-group room by putting a research diary in people’s pockets. Its next trick is harder: using AI to make research faster without turning lived experience into beige summaries.
Survicate
Survey and listen to your customers across every channel, automatically identify key themes, and rally teams around feedback - all in Survicate's platform.
Refiner
In-app surveys that integrate with your product and data stack.
UserTesting
How a two-person idea about watching strangers click around a website turned into a $1.3 billion research empire that now sits between companies and the customers they can no longer afford to guess about.
Condens
Bring all your customer knowledge together, analyze it fast, and surface evidence-backed insights your team and AI agents can both act on.
Aurelius
A research repository built by two UX veterans in a Minneapolis basement, Aurelius helps product teams turn piles of interview notes into searchable, shareable insights - without losing a single finding to a forgotten spreadsheet.
Poth Labs
Poth Labs is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native customer research platform. Poth connects to a company's scattered customer data - analytics, call transcripts, support tickets, surveys, CRM notes - and unifies it into a searchable model of the customer. It then generates hypotheses about why users behave the way they do, and validates them using existing data plus adaptive interviews that adjust to each response. The goal is to move product, growth, and leadership teams past knowing what users did toward understanding why. Founded in 2026 by ex-Palantir engineer Matthew Wong and ex-Tietoevry engineer Mojmir Horvath, Poth Labs is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.
Dovetail
Dovetail is a Sydney-founded customer intelligence platform that pulls scattered customer signals - sales calls, support tickets, surveys, app reviews, usability tests - into one searchable place and uses AI to turn them into themes, dashboards and decisions. Started in 2017 by two ex-Atlassian employees, Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers, it began life as a repository for user researchers and grew into an organisation-wide intelligence layer used by roughly 40% of the Fortune 500, including AWS, Visa, Atlassian, Canva and Johns Hopkins. Accel led a US$63M Series A in January 2022 at a valuation north of US$700 million.
Rally UXR
Rally UXR is a New York-based user research CRM that helps enterprise product and research teams talk to their users at scale. It replaces spreadsheets and disconnected tools by unifying participant management, recruitment, scheduling, incentives and governance in a single platform, letting teams run more research safely and in compliance. Founded in 2021 by Oren Friedman and Alec Robins, Rally is a Y Combinator (W22) company that raised an $11M Series A in June 2025 and has supported research with more than 10 million users across customers like Sonos, Adobe, GitLab, MongoDB and Webflow.
Askable
Askable is an Australian, AI-powered user research platform that combines a global panel of verified participants, certified human researchers, and research-specific AI into a single system meant to replace a team's whole research stack. Founded in 2017 in Brisbane, it started as recruitment software - the self-described 'Uber for user testing' - and has grown into an end-to-end product research suite used by teams at brands like Atlassian, Canva, Wise and Toyota. After roughly six years bootstrapped and profitable, the company raised a A$22M Series A led by AirTree Ventures in 2024 to expand in the US and UK and deepen its AI tooling.
Entropik
Entropik is a deep-tech company that builds a unified human insights platform powered by Emotion AI, Behavior AI, and Generative AI. Founded in 2016 in Bangalore, it uses facial coding, eye tracking, and voice AI - backed by 17 global patents - to decode why consumers make decisions, not just what they do. Its flagship products, Decode and Qatalyst, let brands run quantitative, qualitative, media, and shopper research at scale, replacing slow traditional market research with real-time, AI-driven insights used by companies like P&G, Nestle, and JP Morgan.
Maze
Maze is a user research and product testing platform that lets product teams test prototypes, run usability studies, and gather customer insights at speed. Founded in 2018 by Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary, it has grown into an AI-powered research platform used by more than 60,000 product teams - from startups to Atlassian, Braze and Lowe's.
Marvin
Marvin (legally Equafin Inc., operating as HeyMarvin) is an AI-native customer insights platform that helps product, design, and research teams capture interviews, analyze qualitative data, and turn scattered customer feedback into a searchable, shareable repository.