The top product announcements from Disco Conf 2024

Far too often product teams face a choice: move fast or incorporate user insights. As the pace of product development has accelerated, it’s become increasingly difficult to collect insights quickly enough to keep up. In this fast-moving landscape, teams need solutions that allow learning to match the speed of development, without sacrificing momentum.

Today at Disco Conf 2024, we announced a range of platform enhancements that help product teams overcome trade-offs between speed and learning from users, so they can build the right products faster.

“We have learned from our customers that they need a full-stack of research tools to support all phases of development, from discovery to definition to delivery,” said Chief Product Officer George O’Brien during the Product Vision Keynote. “Today I’m proud to say Maze is on its way to becoming the leading user research platform that enables teams to continuously incorporate user insights across the product development lifecycle.”

Read on for the full breakdown of everything we announced at Disco Conf 2024, as well as a recap of our recent launches, and a glimpse into the future of Maze.

Maze now lets you choose between goal-based and free explore tasks for prototype testing. This allows for greater flexibility to meet diverse research objectives, whether you're exploring a new concept or evaluating a specific user flow. Maze also automatically structures the results by task type, with tailored visualizations and interactivity designed to help teams more deeply understand different user journeys and behaviors.

Free explore tasks are ideal for product concept testing, enabling users to openly interact with your prototype and provide more unbiased feedback. Now you can collect more organic user journeys without constraints or specific goals, as users provide genuine reactions, behaviors, and preferences that help shape product and design decisions.

Combined with the recent release of Clips, you can now combine recordings of users with quantitative data like user paths and heatmaps, providing a more holistic view of the opportunity space.

Free exploration is available now on all Maze plans.

Goal-based tasks are better suited for usability testing, allowing you to define success criteria and measure how effectively users complete specific actions. Maze now offers two different approaches to goal-based tasks: path-based and screen-based.

With screen-based success, you can define target screens as goals, giving your end users the freedom to achieve success through different paths. This reveals new “paths in the grass,” showing organic user behaviors and unexpected routes to task completion.

The path-based success option enables you to evaluate distinct user flows by defining specific paths to completion. This method excels at pinpointing precise areas for improvement within a predetermined user journey.

When used individually and combined throughout the product lifecycle, these features provide rich data on task completion rates, time-to-completion, and success paths, allowing you to measure and understand user motivations and behaviors, especially when paired with Clips and survey questions.

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

Announced today, the new Sankey diagram brings user journeys to life, regardless of your chosen prototype testing method. This powerful visualization tool adapts to your specific task type—whether path-based, screen-based, or free exploration—to highlight what is most relevant to your research.

The Sankey diagram uses intuitive color-coding to quickly convey success types, drop-off points, and exits. The interactive elements allow for deep-dive analysis into overall screen performance. By clicking on a screen name within the diagram, you can access detailed heatmaps and associated clips, providing a holistic view of user interactions at each stage of their journey.

With user journeys displayed in this visual report, complex user data can be transformed into a more compelling story, enabling stakeholders to quickly grasp key insights and making your findings more actionable.

The new Sankey diagram is available now on all Maze plans.

With the Maze platform evolving each month, at Disco Conf 2024, we also recapped the key launches from this year that are improving how our customers get user insights quickly and at scale.

In June, we launched Interview Studies, dramatically streamlining the moderated research process. This powerful solution reduces moderated research timelines from months to weeks, offering robust scheduling customizations, flexible recruitment options, and AI-driven analysis and reporting.

By automating time-consuming tasks and generating insight-packed reports with video highlights and quotes, Interview Studies empowers you to deepen understanding of users, align stakeholders around shared insights, and drive better product decisions.

Interview Studies is available now on Organization plans only.

Released this past spring, Variant Comparison allows you to compare up to five design options within a single study. This helps you quickly identify the design that resonates most with users, while reducing cognitive bias and maintaining flexibility in a study.

Variant Comparison is available now on Organization plans only.

Looking ahead, Maze is focused on making user research more accessible and integral to decisions that impact the broader organization. Today, we shared a vision for curating and combining granular data points into powerful research narratives, which we call Atomic Evidence.

In this vision, user insights are no longer confined to static reports or isolated studies, but able to be embedded where product and business decisions are made. The goal is to empower our customers to break down findings into fundamental units of insight—the ‘atoms’ of evidence–and build dynamic, interconnected artifacts within and outside Maze.

While we're still in the early stages of developing Atomic Evidence, we're excited about the potential to increase the scope and impact of user research, not only by improving existing research methods, but fundamentally rethinking how we capture, analyze, and act on user insights.

From problem discovery with interviews, to concept testing with free exploration, to refining designs with variant comparison, the Maze platform is rapidly evolving to bring user insights into every decision across product development. We're excited to see how these new capabilities will empower you to build products that delight users and drive business impact.