Make better decisions, faster: Maze’s spring 2024 product updates

In the relentless pursuit of building successful digital products, time is of the essence. However, in today's fast-paced landscape, speed of development should never come at the expense of valuable user insights. At Maze, we understand this challenge faced by product teams across industries. Our mission is to empower our customers to make products work for people by providing cutting-edge solutions that bridge the gap between rapid product development and comprehensive user understanding.

If you've been following Maze, you know us as the industry leader in unmoderated user research, especially usability testing. This spring, we've raised the bar even higher with several exciting product updates that extend our leadership in unmoderated testing. With these new features, researchers, designers, and product managers can accelerate their time-to-right by rapidly collecting and incorporating user feedback at every stage of the product development cycle.

"These new features mark a significant leap forward in our ongoing mission to revolutionize the way teams approach unmoderated research, and I'm genuinely thrilled about the impact they'll have on our customers' research capabilities. I'm incredibly proud of our team's dedication to pushing the boundaries of what's possible," shares Netali Jakubovitz, Director of Product Management at Maze.

Designed to simplify your design testing process, Variant Comparison is a robust and versatile addition to Maze's suite of features. With this enhancement, you can easily test and compare multiple designs in a fair and unbiased manner, all within a single study.

What distinguishes our Variant Comparison block from similar offerings in other tools is its flexibility, empowering you to tailor your tests to your unique circumstances. Whether you’re exploring two designs or five, our intuitive interface allows you to compare variants and analyze results quickly and easily in a single maze.

Choose between alternating or exclusive participant distribution methods to suit your research goals. The alternating distribution method ensures each participant sees all variants, fostering a comprehensive understanding of differences. Conversely, the exclusive distribution method guarantees an even distribution of participants, with each engaging exclusively with one variant to eliminate bias.

Variant Comparison isn't limited to testing design prototypes; you can integrate any maze question block within a variant. This means you can conduct a wide range of tests, from prototype tests to information architecture assessments like card sorting and tree testing.

Setting up a test is straightforward. Mix and match questions to gather comprehensive insights, supplementing your prototypes with opinion scales, open questions, or any other block. With robust quantitative result data presented side-by-side, you can easily compare variants and make informed design decisions faster than ever before.

Learn more. The Variant Comparison block is an exclusive Organization feature.

Maze-wide Clips expands our unmoderated research capabilities by introducing robust and granular audio, video, and screen recording settings to complement our existing rich quantitative data collection. Now, you have the flexibility to toggle each recording type individually, seamlessly integrating deep qualitative insights throughout your entire study.

Unlike other tools that may focus solely on quantitative or qualitative aspects, Maze provides the perfect blend of both, ensuring you don't have to compromise depth of insight for speed. Whether you prioritize screen recordings for in-depth user interactions, facial expressions through video, or audio narration for comprehensive context, Maze-wide Clips empowers you to curate qualitative data precisely as desired, without overburdening or underutilizing your participants.

For instance, imagine you're testing a new user flow in your app or evaluating updated navigation. With Maze-wide Clips, you can gather precise interaction metrics alongside tailored recordings, giving you complete context about user experiences.

With qualitative feedback readily available at every stage of your study, Maze-wide Clips empowers you to gain a deeper understanding of your users’ needs and behaviors.

Learn more. Maze-wide Clips are available on all paid plans.

Finding and identifying the right participants for your user research is crucial, but traditional screening methods are often inefficient and inaccurate. They can severely limit your participant pool before your study even begins or, worse, result in low-quality responses that lack context about your users' perspectives and needs.

Maze’s Custom Screener represents a transformative addition to Maze's toolkit, empowering you to craft tailored screening criteria that resonate with your unique needs and enhance the quality of your insights. This new block type puts you in control–so you can design questions that automatically qualify or disqualify participants based on your specific parameters.

By honing in on participants with uniquely relevant traits, Custom Screener enables you to build deep conviction in your research findings. While you may receive fewer responses, each one is meticulously aligned with your criteria, ensuring a higher caliber of understanding. Engaging with this targeted audience, you can extract high-quality, actionable insights more efficiently than ever before, avoid wasting resources, and ensure every response contributes meaningfully to your analysis.

Learn more. Screeners are an exclusive Organization plan feature.

Maze's Spring 2024 product release underscores our position as a leader in unmoderated user research. With Variant Comparison, Maze-wide Clips, and Custom Screener, we're not just offering individual solutions; we're providing a comprehensive toolkit designed to uplevel the way teams approach unmoderated research.

By seamlessly integrating quantitative data with qualitative insights, refining participant selection, and offering unparalleled flexibility in variant testing, Maze empowers teams to make better decisions, faster. Our collective suite of features ensures that you can gather high-quality, actionable insights efficiently, without sacrificing depth or speed.

With these new features, you can embark on your product development journey with confidence, knowing that Maze is by your side–enabling you to build products that resonate with your users faster than ever before. As we continue to innovate, stay tuned for exciting developments in moderated research, coming soon.