11 UX tools for organizing, researching, and synthesizing data

To continue to provide customer delight, your business must identify user experience (UX) issues and fix them for the user. But conducting UX research can be a complex, time-consuming process—you need to plan your research, and collect, organize, and synthesize data to inform UX priorities. 

Using UX tools helps you automate repetitive tasks, streamline processes, unearth rich data, and make research insights accessible across different teams. If you’re confused about which tools to pick for your unique research needs, this article is here to help. We list the best UX research tools and show you how they can help you provide a stellar experience for your customers at different stages in the research process.

The benefits of different UX research tools

“Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” is bad advice for UX research. You want to find out exactly what’s blocking your customers from finding what they need to purchase your products—and fix it.

Instead of relying on manual UX research, you can automate different aspects of the process using specialized tools that help you streamline workflows.

UX research tools help you:

• Extract rich data and insights: UX research tools give you access to high-quality data you can analyze and convert into actionable insights. They offer granular data that would be difficult to unearth manually.

• Cut down on time manually searching for insights: many research tools come with integrations and workflow management features that help you automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks, so you can focus more on implementing UX improvements than on managing research data.

• Organize and centralize research: UX research is not a one-person task. It requires organizational synergy and cross-functional collaboration. UX research tools act as the go-to resource for all team members, allowing them to easily access data, validate their ideas, and manage task coordination. This makes the process more efficient, eliminating bottlenecks and delays so you can deliver excellent experiences faster.

UX research tools can help you create customer delight, but it’s important to know which tools to use at different stages of the research process.

Let’s look at the different types of UX research tools and how they can help you with different aspects of UX design in your journey to enhance the customer experience (CX).

Tools to plan, organize, and manage the UX research process

The first step in the UX research process is planning and organizing: the way you start your research defines the kind of insights it’ll help you uncover.

You want tools in this phase to help you manage the entire process in a single space, build a repository to manage your data, create journey maps, and specify the who, what, why, and when of your UX research to centralize your findings and make them accessible to stakeholders and team members. This process helps designers and product teams separate the wheat from the chaff, decide what needs to be prioritized, and manage the entire process in a goal-driven way. 

Here are our top planning, organizing, and project management tool picks: 

1. Notion

What it is 

Notion is an all-in-one workspace from where teams can manage their tasks, create their product roadmap, store their research data, and more.

How it helps 

Notion is the platform at the center of your UX research process, thanks to products that complement each other: 

• Projects: manage the entire process (even beyond the UX research phase) regardless of the size of your team, view it as a timeline, table, or calendar, filter and sort tasks, and create and visualize dependencies

• Wikis: centralize your research into a single source of truth, document your learnings, easily find and edit the data from user interviews and other UX research methods

• Docs: go beyond text and bullets points and communicate more efficiently with flexible building blocks and 50+ content types, collaborate with your team

Beyond this, Notion integrates with more tools (some of them on this list 😉) to automate your workflows, and the tool’s integrated AI assistant further helps you be more efficient throughout the entire process. 

Pricing

Notion is free for individuals. Paid plans start at $8/mo (billed annually).

2. Airtable

What it is 

Airtable is a cloud-based platform that combines spreadsheets and databases. It’s a low-code tool with a neat interface that offers templates for multiple use cases like project management, timesheets, and planners.

How it helps 

Airtable is a user-friendly solution for storing raw data and organizing it systematically in line with your goals. The tool's automation capabilities synthesize your user research data and insights into meaningful dashboards. 

What’s more, Airtable helps you arrange your data points and easily map out the next steps. You can leverage the platform’s multiple view options to visualize your data from different perspectives.

Pricing

Free for up to five creators. Paid plans start at $10 per seat/month (billed annually).

3. Miro

What it is 

Miro is a visual platform that lets your team connect, collaborate in real-time, and create together. Essentially a whiteboard, this collaborative tool has versatile capabilities for diagramming, mind mapping, and creating flowcharts and presentations. 

How it helps 

Packed with unique features for documenting data and ideas, Miro helps users brainstorm and creatively compose ideas. It doubles as a database, allowing you to present your research and highlight meaningful patterns. You can also use affinity diagramming to categorize both qualitative and quantitative data thematically.

Pricing

Free for up to three editable boards and unlimited team members. Paid plans start at $8 per member/month (billed annually).

4. Condens

What it is

Condens is a research repository ideal for storing and analyzing your data seamlessly. The tool helps structure the raw information you’ve collected from multiple sources by creating intuitive patterns. 

How it helps

With its focus on boosting real-time collaboration, Condens strengthens your UX data analysis using AI-assisted tagging and powerful segmentation to elevate your research process. The tool also offers automatic transcription, participant panel management, and highlight reels to add more depth to your research.

Pricing

15-day free trial. Paid plans start at €30/month (billed annually).

Tools to collect user data and feedback

Throughout the UX research process, you’ll come across two types of data: qualitative and quantitative. While qualitative data is language-based and more subjective, quantitative data gives you a measurable numerical value for a key performance indicator (KPI).

In the context of UX research, quantitative insights help you understand user behaviors through numbers, which is the first step in knowing what you can do to achieve your desired result. Qualitative data, on the other hand, helps you understand why users behave the way they do.

Let’s look at the best user research tools for collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data to improve the user experience. 

5. Hotjar Observe and Ask

What it is 

Hotjar (hello there 👋) is a multi-product, digital experience insights platform that collects and analyzes both qualitative and quantitative data which you can use to enhance the user experience. Its many tools and features generate in-depth insights about user behavior and customer feedback to give you a data-informed picture of your product or website analytics, so you discover the what and the why, all in the same place. 

How it helps 

Hotjar provides your team with actionable, holistic insights to better understand your users and their behavior. Built with privacy in mind from day one, the industry leader makes the UX research process more efficient, saving you time and money by gathering all the insights you need in an easy-to-use central platform. Here’s how Hotjar Observe and Ask help you collect user data and feedback:

Hotjar Observe: spot patterns in user behavior to improve your site with confidence, zoom in and out from high-level behavior patterns to recordings of real user experiences, and put yourself in the customer's shoes to make changes that matter. 

• Heatmaps: see a visual representation of where users click, move, and scroll on your site

• Recordings: watch replays of real user sessions to understand exactly how people interact with your site, and filter recordings by Frustration and Engagement Score, events, path, and much more

Hotjar Ask: collect voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback and discover how users feel as they experience your site or product.

• Surveys: capture in-the-moment user feedback with on-site and external surveys, learn more about what users and customers love (or hate) about your site or product—and why—and get started with 40+ survey templates

• Feedback: understand what users really think about your site, let them highlight specific parts of the page they have feedback on, and spot which pages do not match their expectations

In addition to all this, Hotjar is packed with more useful features—like Highlights to share key user insights, Trends to spot overarching behavior patterns, Integrations to automate your work, and Funnels to spot where users drop off in your most important flows. 

Pricing 

Get started for free. Or choose one of the paid plans to unlock more features. The best part? You pay only for the products you need!

6. Loop11

What it is

Loop11 is a remote UX research tool that facilitates moderated and unmoderated interviews to help you learn about your users' experience with your product. Through dedicated features for collecting, organizing, and visualizing your insights, it offers a comprehensive and collaborative research platform. 

How it helps

Loop11 contributes to your qualitative research with user and usability testing tools that let you test prototypes and live websites (on mobile, desktop, or tablet). It’s a great UX research software for: 

• Usability testing: analyze your site’s usability with users performing actual tasks

• Benchmarking: compare your site or product’s usability against your competitors

• Prototype testing: test wireframes and prototypes to validate new products or features before actually developing them

• A/B testing: test multiple designs against each other to determine which one offers the best UX and converts better

• Information architecture testing: design and refine your information architecture by observing how users navigate your site

Loop11 allows you to bring your own research participants into their usability testing platform. If you don’t have any, the tool makes participant recruitment easy by tapping into their own pool of testers.

Pricing

14-day free trial, then plans start at $179/mo (billed annually).

7. Hotjar Engage

What it is

Hotjar Engage (hey again 👋) is a user interview tool that lets you recruit the right users for your UX research and tests and allows you to spend less time on admin tasks, and more time turning insights into action. It empowers design, product, marketing, and UX teams to research user behavior, identify improvement opportunities, and validate assumptions.

How it helps

Hotjar Engage enables remote usability testing and remote user research by letting you:

• Recruit participants from a pool of 175,000+ verified research participants, or add your own usability testers

• Automate scheduling and hosting of moderated interviews

• Download transcripts of your video calls, so you can focus on gathering insights from your users during the interview 

• Share and download highlights and time-stamped notes with your team and create video clips of key insights

• Bring in additional observers and moderators

What’s more, Engage syncs with the other products on the Hotjar platform. After each interview, watch recordings and heatmaps to get deeper insights into what participants did—and why.

Pricing 

Get started for free and pay as you go, or unlock more features with a paid plan, starting from €72/mo (billed annually).

8. Maze

What it is

Maze’s toolkit makes it a comprehensive UX research platform helping teams develop better products. It lets you build a cross-company research process and validate product designs, messaging, usability, and more.

How it helps

Maze provides a comprehensive UX research solution with features that include prototype testing, tree testing, card sorting, in-product prompts, and more. The platform lets you:

• Test: experiment with and validate prototypes, wireframes, concepts, copy, and more

• Integrate: work seamlessly with the best design tools to validate ideas and speed up the design process

• Report: get actionable user insights with automated metrics and reports

• Reach: send targeted research campaigns to your tailored participant database

Pricing 

Free for one active project and 300 responses per year. Paid plans start at $75/mo (billed annually).

Tools to create new designs or features to solve user problems

Now that you've gathered your UX research data, it’s time to make improvements to your site or product. Of course, before the development phase, you need to prototype and wireframe changes.

Design tools are essential to the UX research process, as they let you bring your ideas to life and turn the precious user feedback that you collected beforehand into new products and features.

Here are our top 3 UI design tools that build new products and features:

9. Figma

What it is

Figma is a collaborative UI design tool that helps teams stay aligned throughout the research and development processes. It enables teams to ship new products faster.

How it helps

Figma’s powerful all-in-one design platform allows UX teams to prototype while they design, and vice versa, with powerful features:

• Interactive prototypes: go beyond UI design and turn static files into an interactive experience to give testers a taste of the real thing.

• Share and collect feedback: toggle between your design file and live prototype, then share the latter and enable comments so user feedback stays in the same place

• Fasten development: take the guesswork out of the equation for your developers by including animations and transitions

Figma also integrates with other UX research tools on this list like Notion and Maze, simplifying your workflows.

Pricing 

Free for 3 Figma files. Paid plans start at €12 per editor/month.

10. Adobe XD

What it is

Adobe XD is premium collaborative UI design software, downloadable for Windows or macOS. You can subscribe to Adobe XD as a standalone app or as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, which also includes Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. 

How it helps

Adobe XD’s collaborative vector-based experience design platform provides tools to craft prototypes that look and feel like the real thing:

• Components and States: create design elements once and reuse them multiple times, or create variations to simulate interactions

• 3D transform: simulate 3D effects when creating immersive and interactive experiences, and rotate objects to view mockups in perspective

• Share designs and prototypes: collaborate with stakeholders and designers in a centralized platform

Pricing 

Start for free. Paid plans start at $9.99/month (billed annually).

11. Sketch

What it is

Sketch is a complete design platform for Mac users, boasting thoughtful features and an intuitive UI.

How it helps

Sketch provides design tools to help you create early wireframes, prototypes, and flexible design systems:

• Flexibility: sketch your whole design from canvas to code

• Consistency: turn your elements and components into templates and reuse them everywhere

• Collaboration: design with your team in real-time, test your prototypes, and improve your workflows with hundreds of plugins and integrations

Pricing 

30-day free trial. Plans start at $9 per editor/month.

Use UX research tools to prioritize brilliantly 

UX research is extremely important in improving the user experience, allowing you to go beyond guesswork and instinct, and base your decisions on data-informed insights. UX research tools facilitate this process by simplifying and automating tasks and offering a birds-eye view of all your research discoveries so you can prioritize the UX elements that matter most to your users. 

By identifying the right tools to use at each stage of the UX research process, you can save time, streamline your workflow, and create a better user experience.