Looking back: Our top 10 product releases of 2024

As 2024 ends, we're reflecting on a big year at Maze. Our customers can now use Maze at every stage of the product development lifecycle, making it easier to recruit the right audience, analyze results, and share insights with ease. These enhancements were shaped by listening to customers through our own platform, ensuring each release genuinely improves their work and modernizes the user research experience.

This year, we introduced tools for concept testing, split testing, user interviews, and more—all designed to make research faster, more effective, and more impactful. Let’s look back at the top 10 releases that defined 2024.

In early 2024, we released screener blocks to help you find the right research participants by automatically qualifying and disqualifying them based on your specific criteria. By screening for the most qualified participants, you can rest assured that every response comes from someone who matches your needs, enhancing the quality and relevance of your research.

Screeners are available now on Organization plans only.

We streamlined our CSV exports to make your results data more accessible and easier to analyze outside Maze. With cleaner formatting and instant downloads, you can now quickly transform data into shareable insights that your whole team can act on.

CSV exports are available now on all paid Maze plans.

We also enhanced in-platform analysis with our new participant metadata filters, empowering you to analyze research data with greater flexibility and precision. Filter by device type, recruitment source, completion status, duration, or date ranges to spot trends and ensure data quality. Whether you're monitoring changes in behavior over time or focusing on high-quality responses, new metadata filters help you convert raw data into actionable insights.

Metadata filters are available now on Organization plans only.

Understanding how users navigate your prototypes requires more than just data—it needs clear visualization. We introduced Sankey diagrams to bring user journeys to life, showing the most common paths users take, where they succeed, and where they drop off. Click any point in the journey to dive deeper: examine heatmaps, analyze click data, and watch participant reactions through Clips recordings. These visualizations automatically adapt to your prototype test type, making complex user behavior patterns easy to understand at a glance.

The Sankey diagram is available now on all Maze plans.

Comprehensive Clips recordings, released in early 2024, give you control over what you capture and provide audio and visual context for participant feedback. Choose to record screen, video, or audio for your entire study, in any combination. But recording is just the start. Highlight Reels allow you to curate your most important clips into compelling video summaries that showcase key findings. Select key moments, add context, and Maze automatically builds the video—no editing tools needed. Share these reels directly through your team's collaboration tools, making user insights impossible to ignore.

Clips are available now on all paid Maze plans.

In addition to enhancing the way you capture and share participant recordings, we’ve also improved how participants engage with your tests. A new introduction screen guides participants on how to think out loud, while gentle reminders throughout the session encourage ongoing verbal feedback. We even added noisy environment checks to ensure clear audio quality. The impact is clear: with our new educational prompts, participants speak twice as long during tests, delivering richer, more natural insights.

This year we delivered a simpler way to measure success in usability testing. Instead of defining exact paths, you can now set any screen as a goal, giving users the freedom to reach it their own way. Just pick a starting point and a destination screen. Maze provides clear success metrics and a tailored Sankey diagram, making it easier than ever to get the signals you need to make design decisions.

Goal-based success task types are available now on all Maze plans.

To better capture authentic user behavior, we introduced a new free explore option for prototype tests. Participants can navigate your prototype without predefined paths or goals, while Maze collects every click, path, and interaction. It's built for early concept testing when you want to observe natural user behavior and first impressions without influencing how people engage with your designs. When combined with comprehensive Clips recordings, you get the perfect blend of “what happened” and “why.”

Free explore task types are available now on all Maze plans.

This year, we took on one of your top pain points and delivered a game-changer: a way to test and compare multiple designs within a single study. But we didn't just build another A/B testing tool—we created something more powerful.

With Variant Comparison, you can compare up to five different designs in a single test, going beyond the traditional two-variant limitation. You choose how participants experience variants, either showing all options to each person or distributing variants across different participants. This flexibility lets you adapt your research approach based on your sample size, potential bias concerns, and study goals.

What makes Variant Comparison unique is its versatility and ease of use. By mixing a variety of Maze blocks in your comparison, like prototype tests, opinion scales, and open questions, you can gather comprehensive insights across all variants. All results appear side by side on a single screen, making it easier to surface patterns. The results are clear: over half of our customers have already used Variant Comparison, with 40% of those customers making it a regular part of their research toolkit.

Variant Comparison is available now on Organization plans only.

At the beginning of 2024, Maze was known best for helping teams run fast, effective usability tests. While we’d already added new features for surveys and card sorting, one crucial part of the research process remained under-addressed: moderated user interviews. Your feedback showed us that, even with existing approaches, interviews remained time-consuming, fragmented, and often created more questions than answers.

Maze Interview Studies, released in June, reimagines user interviews for product teams that need to move quickly, but without forgoing deeper qualitative insights. Built with AI, the product streamlines every step of the interview process. You can find and screen participants from a global panel of 3 million people (or bring your own participants), automatically schedule sessions that sync with your team's calendars, and run interviews directly in Maze or through your preferred platform.

The real magic happens after your interviews: AI helps convert hours of conversations into clear summaries and themes, automatically creating reports that distill and amplify your customers' voice across your organization. With Interview Studies, you get rich qualitative insights delivered in time to meaningfully contribute to product decisions.

Discover how Maze Interview Studies accelerates the journey from interviews to customer-centric decisions, featuring a real-life example from our own team. Read more.

Interview Studies is available now on Organization plans only.

As we wrap up 2024, these 10 releases represent key building blocks behind Maze's evolution into a holistic research platform. From capturing quality feedback from the right participants, to quickly transforming hours of interviews into reliable insights, each improvement was born from close collaboration with our customers.

But what excites us most isn't what we've built—it's what you'll build with it. These tools are already helping teams make better decisions, understand their users more deeply, and move faster than ever. As we look to 2025, we're more committed than ever to our mission: making user insights an integral part of every product decision.

Thank you for being part of our journey this year. We can't wait to show you what's next! 💙