AnswerLab

In short

AnswerLab has run research for large companies for more than 20 years, and its team of 200+ researchers, strategists and designers is weighted heavily toward the first of those. It now describes itself as a research-powered experience strategy firm: qualitative and quantitative studies, diary and in-home work, AI workflow analysis, and the roadmaps that come out the other end. Its listed office is at Penn 1 in New York. It is #2 on our UX research ranking.

Its case studies name industries, not clients, which is normal in this line of work. For an education platform losing teachers, it reframed retention as adoption and interviewed new, active and churned educators. A cloud storage app got 60-minute moderated sessions on participants' own phones, which traced drop-off to pricing shown too early. For a Fortune 100 company it built a research-operations team that grew past 30 specialists recruiting for over 100 studies a month.

Enterprise product organisations with more research questions than in-house researchers, or a recruiting problem with hard-to-reach B2B audiences, are where AnswerLab earns its fee; a UX director from Mazda's Garage team is quoted on its site. Startups wanting a quick round of tests will find it heavy, and teams that want the same people to run the study and then design and build the fix should hire a design firm with a research practice.