The 1:10:100 rule, or the cost of bad quality, states that initial research will cost you $1, changes to the design will cost $10 while changing the product – $100. Knowing how expensive any fixes are, companies rely even more heavily on UX research tools. According to the State of User Research, 82% of respondents use between 4 to 7 research tools monthly. The same survey found that participants used over 200 different software for UX research. With so many options on the market, you may ask how to find the most suitable ones. 

But don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place. Eleken is an agency full of UI/UX designers working for SaaS businesses of all shapes and sizes. We’ve tried dozens of research tools and handpicked the ones that are the most helpful, creative, unique, or exceptional. Below, you will find the top 10 of our favorite user research tools –– hopefully, they will be useful for you, too. And if you’d like to learn more about the UX research process, consider watching the video below.

UX analytics and heatmapping software to gather user data and understand user flows

Some projects fall into our hands to be designed from scratch, while others require a redesign. For the latter, a design audit process is a must since we need to figure out what chunks of the current app work smoothly and what are covered with dust. The analytics and heatmapping tools below always help us gain such insights. 

Hotjar

Hotjar, as our designer Maksym calls it, is a “gold standard in the UX analytics market”. It is a product experience insights and website visualization solution that allows you to not only understand users but also capture the “why” behind their actions. 

Hotjar analytics lets you look at users’ behavior and see where they get stuck — those UX problem areas require your attention. You can even run surveys on the spot to collect users’ feedback.

For example, we used Hotjar when we worked on the Advan Research project, a geographic information system (GIS) that provides complex geographical data to identify tendencies and patterns of people's behavior within a certain location. One of the project goals was to redesign the interface of data analytics. The Advan Research solution had a rather complex interface. Here is how it looked when we got to work on it:

We used Hotjar to record customer behavior patterns, in particular, to study the typical user flows for greater context immersion and to understand users' tasks. To validate our design solutions during the redesign, we used Hotjar’s Heatmaps, the tool that shows where users move, click, and scroll. As a result of our efforts, Eleken designers detected over 30 flaws in the design that could be fixed to improve UX. 

The Hotjar’s famous heatmaps shows you how users are really experiencing your site without drowning in numbers (this tool perfectly aligns with Google Analytics’ scary quantitative graphs and tables). They are helpful on a wider business scale, showing design teams and clients what’s happening and getting their buy-in when changes are needed.

• Free trial: Hotjar offers 35 free daily sessions
• Pricing: starts at $39 per month

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a web analytics platform used to measure and report on user activity on different Internet-connected devices to better understand customers.

To improve the overall user experience, at the UX audit step, we want to surface as many trouble spots as possible. For these tasks, using Google Analytics for UX is as indispensable as ever. It helps to understand how long users stay on a website, what pages they visit and what pages they are missing, what are typical user flows, and so on. 

Google Analytics is the first tool our designer Anastasia turns to when starts working on a new project. With its help, Nastia gains valuable insights about the target audience and demographics, as well as user behavior, that help identify pain points and common user patterns. 

Some might argue that Google Analytics for UX designers is overwhelming. Still, if you know what specific information you need and where to find it, it is not exactly as unbearable as it seems. You can check it right now — Google has a demo account that you can access and explore the possibilities of this tool.

But not all UX designers like Google Analytics. Many of them name the constantly changing nature of Google and frequent updates as the most common frustration that may lead to harder navigation. Yet, Google Analytics is one of the most used tools for UX research that provides a good overview of how users are interacting across devices and platforms.

• Free trial: a full set of basic features is free
• Pricing: a paid version of Google Analytics, known as Google Analytics 360, starts at $150,000 per year

UX documentation tools to plan and manage the UX research process

For designers, the discovery phase of research is the stage of clarifying a lot of things before they start the actual design process. Here are four main questions that usually require attention:

• Do I understand the business and its goals?
• Do I understand the users and their goals?
• Do I understand the market and competition?
• Do I understand the product, its value, and its features?

At this step, the research itself boils down to googling and talking to users and stakeholders, so research tools can hardly help here. However, they can be useful for the systematization and visualization of surfaced insights into UX research artifacts.

Notion 

Notion is a connected workspace for better productivity and note-taking. For the Eleken team, it has become a command center where we store and constantly update our agency's knowledge base. It is a super-flexible tool that helps us organize project documentation, prepare for interviews with either clients or their product users, accumulate feedback, or simply take notes.

The platform consists of four main blocks:

• Wikis that allow you to centralize research and team files into a single place, easily find and edit the data and decisions with convenient filters.
• Docs to store texts, images, and videos, communicate with the team members and collaborate effectively using flexible building blocks and over 50 content types.
• Projects to automate team workflows with a timeline, tables, or calendars, filter and sort tasks, and create and visualize dependencies.
• Notion AI to brainstorm ideas and generate project docs faster. 

The use cases for Notion can go far beyond just managing documentation and creating wikis. Here is a fragment of competitor analysis made in Notion. 

• Free trial: free and unlimited for individuals
• Pricing: pricing starts from $8 per member per month for small groups (2+ members)

Google Workspace

Like any other remote-first company in the world, Eleken uses Google Workspace products, especially Sheets and Docs, for notes, and for some frameworks. 

While most of us have been using Microsoft Office tools for decades to draft everything, from school homework to job reports, Google’s web-based toolkit became a total game-changer. You don’t have to download any software or purchase a suite of programs. Simply log in to your Google account from any browser to create a new document, and that’s it.

Needless to mention how convenient it is to access your cloud-based docs online, share and edit them within your team. If you're a Google user yourself, you have probably tried Google Docs, Slides, Forms, or else. They all don’t cost you a dime, which is pretty awesome. 

While talking about UX research, Google Workplace includes Forms, a survey builder that allows you to create simple and easy-to-use screener surveys and share them with participants. Once the survey is completed, UX researchers can analyze responses with automatic summaries and view charts with response data updates in real time. 

The Forms are already integrated with the Workplace and are totally free. 

• Free trial: free for personal use with basic tools and 14 days of free trial for businesses 
• Pricing: Google Workspace starts at $6 per user per month, with extra features and drive storage of 30 GB and 100 participant video meetings

Usability testing software to validate product designs

When you’ve just designed anything, you’re a little biased. You need someone to tell you the truth about your results. 

Surely, you have your team or your customer, your friends, and your mom, but if you want actual users to test your prototype, you may need tools for user testing, like Maze or Lookback.

Maze

Maze is a-mazing remote user testing platform for unmoderated tests. With Maze, you can create and run in-depth usability tests and share them with your testers via a link to get actionable insights. Maze also generates a usability study report instantly so that you can share it with anyone.

Also, it is the only research tool that lets you run usability tests on solutions already in production and measure user deviations from defined successful paths on live sites, features, and flows.

The tool integrates directly with Figma, InVision, Marvel, and Sketch. Thus, you can import a working prototype directly from the design tool you use. According to our designer Maksym, Maze is his top pick for prototype testing precisely because it works so smoothly with Figma.

Besides unmoderated usability testing, Maze can help with different UX research methods, like card sorting, tree testing, 5-second testing, A/B testing, and more.

• Free trial: free for individuals
• Pricing: starts from $99 per month for small teams

Lookback

Lookback is a user experience research platform great for moderated tests, where you're talking to your testers, seeing their reaction to your prototypes, guiding them through the tasks, and getting their feedback in real-time. 

The tool allows you to broadcast your researches and sync all your customer feedback on a collaborative dashboard to share it with your team and stakeholders. The best part is that you can add comments right on the seekback while watching and examining the videos. 

To keep your team in the loop, Lookback includes Virtual Observation Rooms with chat, timestamped notes, and shared insights.

• Free trial: 5 free sessions and 60-day free trial
• Pricing: starts at $25 per month for 10 sessions

Stark

As of now, accessibility has become a crucial aspect in design as everyone is now aware of accessibility standards and wants to create more accessible solutions. Our designer Julia emphasizes that she likes to use Stark to check readability contrast and the use of colors and design elements in every product, and when working on color palettes for data visualization, simulating colorblindness profiles, and checking the contrast between two layers.  

Stark provides free plugins for Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and the like to help designers easily check readability contrast flip between the eight colorblindness profiles, and adjust designs based on this feedback. 

• Free trial: free access to all non-Sidekick tools (Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD, Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Safari, and Arc). 14-day free trial for 5-seat minimum
• Pricing: starts at $15 per month for unlimited access to Sidekick, AI assistant, reports, insights, and so on.

UX research presentation tools for better collaboration

We at Eleken are people who earn a living making brilliant product ideas shine brighter through design. So, we’re pretty obsessed with how to present UX research findings in a favorable light.

Our research results can take the form of an empathy map, customer journey map, user flow, value proposition canvas, or similar. To create all those visual artifacts nicely and quickly, sometimes we use Google Slides and Pitch, but most frequently — Miro and Figma. 

Miro

There is a lot of magic in the Miro. If you’re a visual person, like most designers, this app will make the visual parts of your brain shake with delight. We at Eleken love this tool, we even included Miro’s website on the list of our favorite landing pages.

It is a simple and pleasing-to-the-eye collaboration whiteboard that works perfectly as a free-form ideation tool. We use it during the discovery phase of UX research for mood boards, user flows, customer journey maps, UX audits, competitors and feature analysis. 

Daria, our UI/UX designer and Miro’s advocate, says she prefers this tool for her research because it’s “cut out for making schemes and models, with an ideal balance between default features and flexibility”.

• Free trial: there’s a freemium option that gives you 3 editable boards
• Pricing: for an unlimited number of boards, prices start at $8 per member per month

Figma with FigJam

Just recently, Figma enabled switching between different accounts and workspaces, and now, everything about Figma is lovely. Everything.

Since the beginning of (design) time, Photoshop has been a universal design tool. About a decade ago, an interface design community packed up their stuff and migrated from Photoshop to Sketch, a product created specifically for collaborative product design teams. Sketch’s preview feature made it easy to showcase prototypes and get feedback. Sketch's autosave feature has given us a sigh of relief. 

A bit later, Figma arrived to revolutionize the way that design teams collaborate one more time. Figma started very similarly to Sketch but with one significant difference — the freemium tier. Later, Figma began adding unique killer features, like live collaboration or the before-mentioned feature for switching between different accounts. 

Much like Google Docs, Figma allows multiple designers to work with a single document, and it’s probably the main reason why Figma clearly surpasses Sketch now.

We use Figma for UI/UX design, for drawing illustrations and logos, and for almost everything else. Moreover, we use Figma to present the results of UX research. Those presentations may be shown in a prototype view or saved as PDF sequences.

In 2021, Figma launched FigJam, a whiteboard tool that makes collaboration even easier with 300+ ready-made templates, including flow charts, customer journey maps, roadmap reviews, project timelines, and so on.

• Free trial: free for 3 Figma and 3 FigJam files
• Pricing: for an unlimited number of projects, the price starts at $12 per editor per month

Timeless pen and notebook

It may sound off in the digital age, but many designers still consider pen and paper as their best tool. Our designer Nastia finds it irreplaceable to quickly sketch the idea of the layout of a page or element, especially if it is some kind of non-standard solution from the point of view of UX. It is a go-to when you don't want to waste time on "drawing" everything but focus on ensuring that that element or page has convenient and understandable user functionality. And it’s free. 

UX research tools comparison matrix

Now, let’s compare the UX research tools above in terms of their type, features, benefits, and rating on G2.

Wrapping up best tools for UX research

Your best UX research tools are always with you, and for free. That's your ability to think and your ability to talk to users and stakeholders. (Almost) all the rest, called to make your life easier, is available for trial or in a freemium version. So, if you’ve met anything new on our list, why not try now?

For more on UX research in all its glory, read our in-depth post about the UX research process that teaches designers, product owners, and anyone who is not a full-time researcher how to perfectly fit studying activities into your product design context. 

And if you need professional UX research for your project, hire Eleken UI/UX designers.