By 2050, there will be 100 million UX professionals in the world, roughly corresponding to 1% of the global population. This is according to Nielsen Norman Group’s Jakob Nielsen, aka the ”Elvis of usability”. “The remaining 99% of the people can then work on building, selling, and servicing what we have designed,” he explains, in case you were wondering.
Whether the industry will see such a boom in the number of people it attracts is yet to be seen. But one thing’s for certain: they will be spoilt for choice when it comes to tools that cut cost, save time, boost efficiency or provide better user insights. Here’s my updated list of solutions that no UX researcher should be without in 2021.
Have your own suggestions? Leave them in the comments below.
1. Maze
Seamlessly integrating with Figma, InVision, Adobe XD, Marvel and Sketch, Maze is product and marketing teams’ fastest shortcut to high-quality user insights. It allows researchers to create in-depth usability tests, share them with users through a link and get their most burning usability questions answered in a matter of hours. Standout features include task analysis, multiple path analysis, heatmaps, A/B testing, guerrilla testing and wireframe testing. Get started for free or go pro for $25 per seat monthly.
2. Condens
This easy-to-use and easy-to-love user research repository turns storing, analyzing and sharing user research data into a fast and enjoyable experience. Expect super-smooth onboarding and benefit from features such as automatic transcription, video clips and highlight reels, AI-assisted tagging and affinity clustering. The result? Raw data distilled into actionable insights in no time. Added bonus: clear research workflows and seamless real-time collaboration with team members. Plans start from €30 per month.
3. Grain
“We go to fewer meetings but still know more about what's happening," a Grain user is quoted saying on the company’s website, and they’re certainly not alone in their sentiment. Allowing researchers to record, clip, transcribe and share highlights of Zoom video calls in real time, Grain can compress a 60-minute meeting into a 3-minute video summary that people will actually want to watch. Plus, you can remix meeting highlights into time-saving summary reels. Give it a try for free or choose a monthly plan from $12 per creator.
4. UXtweak
Nip usability issues in the bud. Set up UXtweak in just ten minutes to see testers interact with your app or website and get a better idea of what they like and dislike about it. Studies are task-based, guided from beginning to end and accessible without installation on the testers’ side. Top feature: card-sorting, hands down. Use open card sorting to vet new ideas, closed for validating existing ones and hybrid to get the best of both worlds. Start small with the free version or pay €90-150 per month to access unlimited tasks and participants.
5. Great Question
Bent on making customer research more accessible to product development teams, Great Question has packed almost every research tool you could possibly need into a single platform to put customers at the heart of all your product strategies and actions. Think scalable opted-in customer panels, smart templates, incentives programme integration, prototype tests as well as scheduling and transcription widgets. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and unlock tons of handy features for $49 or $199 a month.
6. Perfect Recall
Listen to your customers – and Perfect Recall will make sure that you’ll hear and remember what they have to say. Save time thanks to automated recording and transcription and stay focused with time-stamped notes. Then highlight text to create powerful video clips and share the strongest messages to Slack, Notion, Coda, Google Slides and more. Plans range from free to custom, with in-between options for small teams and big businesses at $15 and $35 per month respectively.
7. Avrio
Say goodbye to siloed knowledge, duplicate research projects, information bottlenecks and high-value insights scattered across “Untitled” spreadsheets. An extension-first collaboration platform, Avrio helps researchers capture and share data analysis, user research and learnings in context and turn teams’ collective knowledge into dynamic, easy-to-search, ever-evolving repositories. Get started with 3 users and 7 explorers for free or go unlimited from $30 per month.
+1 PingPong
Real talk: I might be a bit biased when I say that PingPong should be on every UX researcher’s radar. In my defense, our clients seem to agree. On a more serious note, what makes PingPong a go-to platform for many is that it’s a one-stop-shop for all their remote UX research needs, from tester recruitment to payouts.
Participants get selected from a 150,000-strong global pool using smart-screening algorithms, then booked for automatically run and recorded video interviews. You don’t need to worry about post-session to-dos, either. Incentive management and payouts are automatically taken care of via PayPal or Wise. Within a few minutes of concluding your interview, the recording is ready to be revisited, marked for highlights, transcribed by Amazon Transcribe, reduced to its gist and shared with anyone who needs to see it. Interview credits cost €90 each and can be spent on 30-120-minute sessions at your own discretion (detailed pricing information this way).
