Blink UX

In short

Blink UX began in Seattle in 2000 as a research firm and has since built a full product design practice on top of it, adding strategy, design systems, development and AI work, with staff in Boston, New York, San Diego and San Francisco too. Research still sets the agenda; the chief research officer works out of the Seattle studio. That balance puts Blink at #3 on our Seattle list and #4 on our UX research ranking.

NASA is the showcase. Over 26 months Blink helped fold more than 3,000 separate websites into one NASA.gov, after a national survey, hundreds of one-on-one sessions and over 250 usability tests; the new site won a 2024 Webby. For Google it interviewed 27 neurodivergent workers about Gemini and ranked ten AI tools by heuristic review. Avangrid, a utility with 3.3 million customers, worked with Blink for three years on move-in, outage and contractor journeys.

Large organisations with complicated products or public-facing services, and the patience for months of research before design, get the most from Blink, especially when they want the same team to carry the findings into interfaces and a design system. Early-stage startups that need an MVP in weeks, or just a marketing site, will find the process built for a much bigger client than they are.