Research is typically expensive—software-as-a-service companies, for example, spend about 23% of their revenue on R&D—and there’s no assurance that it will result in a good outcome. In a recent CB Insights research, 42% of companies said “no market need” was the reason one of their products failed to acquire traction. Because product research is risky, Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary, both software developers, created Maze, a software product research platform that makes prototyping and surveys easier.
Unlike some other systems, Widawski and Mary underline that Maze was created with complete product teams in mind, rather than just typical user researchers with specific skills.
“There’s always a risk when it comes to creating user-facing experiences.” And the more data we need to completely commit, the riskier the decision. “It’s not easy to validate concepts and gain practical, quantifiable user data to make confident judgments, especially before you have a live product or website,” Widawski said in an email interview with TechCrunch. The maze was founded on the notion that during the design process, product design teams should have simple access to data. Since then, our ambition has developed to enable anybody in product teams to test, learn, and respond quickly. “
Reach is a new solution from Maze that allows users to construct a database of research participants, distribute research studies via email campaigns, and gather the results. Clips, a more recent function, record video and screen recordings of users trying a product.
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