11 UX tools for organizing, researching, and synthesizing data

You’ve got a great product. You're seeing conversions, generating solid revenue, and hitting your forecasted sales quota. But you’re also seeing a steadily increasing bounce rate, high cart abandonment rate, and user complaints about a bug-infested digital experience.

What to do?

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

This article lists the best UX research tools and shows you how they help you provide a stellar experience for your customers at different stages in the research process.

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.

In this phase, you want tools 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

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that lets teams 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, and easily find and edit the data from user interviews and other UX research methods

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

2. Airtable

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. The platform’s multiple view options allow you to visualize your data from different perspectives.

3. Miro

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.

4. Condens

Condens is a research repository ideal for seamlessly storing and analyzing data. 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.

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. Contentsquare 

Contentsquare (hello there 👋) is a multi-product, experience intelligence platform that collects and analyzes both quantitative and qualitative user behavior data, so you discover the what and the why, in a single platform and enhance the user experience. 

How it helps 

Built with privacy in mind from day one, Contentsquare makes the UX research process more efficient, saving you time and money. Here’s how Contentsquare helps you collect user data and feedback:

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

• 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

• Session Replay: watch replays of real user sessions to understand exactly how people interact with your site, and filter recordings by rage clicks, frustration score, events, and much more

Watch session replays and launch surveys with Contentsquare   

• Interviews: recruit and interview the right users from a pool of 200,000 verified participants or use your own testers. This allows teams to focus on gathering insights, validating assumptions, and identifying opportunities for improvement.

• Tests: conduct fast, on-demand user testing by creating tasks and scenarios for participants. You can gather qualitative feedback through replays, understand user behavior, and identify pain points. Then, easily share insights and collaborate with your team to drive UX improvements.

• Benchmarks: compare your site’s performance against industry standards and competitors. Track key metrics like engagement, conversion, and user behavior to identify areas for improvement. Use these insights to set realistic goals and enhance your strategy.

Contentsquare’s Benchmarks tool helps you track key metrics and compare site performance against industry standards

Pro tip: if you’ve received negative feedback, Contentsquare lets you watch that user’s session replay to understand what went wrong and spot UX improvement opportunities.

Use Contentsquare’s Microsoft Teams or Slack integration to be alerted as soon as a user has answered one of your surveys, and align your entire team around user feedback.

Contentsquare's Slack integration keeps your team instantly updated with real-time alerts for error spikes

6. Loop11

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.

Pro tip: use Contentsquare to test your prototypes and wireframes with a concept testing survey to gather feedback from real users.

Contentsquare’s Surveys tool lets you customize every aspect of your surveys and tests to capture the most relevant user feedback

8. Maze

Maze’s toolkit makes it a comprehensive UX research platform that helps 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

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

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.

10. Adobe XD

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

11. Sketch

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

Use UX research tools to prioritize brilliantly 

UX research is extremely important in improving the user experience. It allows 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 an extensive 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.

FAQs about UX research tools