As the research field continues to evolve at lightning speed, UX professionals who keep up with the latest industry trends will be better equipped to empower their entire organization to leverage user insights, and build products that meet customers' shifting needs.
To identify these trends, we surveyed 800 product professionals for The Future of User Research Report 2025, to understand the current landscape of user research, and challenges facing People Who Do Research (PWDR). Read on as we unpack the most influential trends, alongside insight from industry experts at Adobe, Broadcom, Cisco, GoodRX, Simplii Financial, and Twilio.
TL;DR: Top UX research trends in 2025
Here are the top eight trends fueling the user research industry, according to our Future of User Research Report 2025:
- Organizations continue to look to customer insights to drive business growth
- The majority of research teams are now using artificial intelligence (AI)
- User interviews and usability testing lead as the most common methods throughout the product lifecycle
- Time to right: the push to build the right products fast is fueling research demand
- Time and bandwidth remain the top challenges for product teams
- The number one use case for AI is automating manual research tasks
- The UX researcher role is shifting from technical executor to educator
- User testing is a team sport: user research is a collective effort across teams
1. Organizations continue to look to customer insights to drive business growth
Companies using research to inform business strategy make better data-driven decisions by incorporating customer knowledge earlier in the product development lifecycle. Research is most impactful when it builds a deep understanding of customer needs, driving strategic decisions about what to build. That’s where companies see significant ROI in terms of product-market fit and revenue growth.
Kate Pazoles
Senior Manager, User Research at Twilio
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A key UX research trend highlighted in The Future of User Research Report 2025 shows definitively that research helps organizations improve decision-making and positively impacts customer satisfaction, product adoption, user activation, and revenue. User research is increasingly influencing organizational decision-making with most organizations in our audience (87%) leveraging user research to inform critical decisions.
We discovered that the more research is integrated, the more impact it has on business outcomes. When research is integrated into business decisions and operations, there are significant gains in brand perception (5x), more active users (3.6x), and better product-market fit (3.2x) compared to organizations that rarely incorporate user research into their decision-making.
We've found that when we invest in understanding user behaviors, pain points, and motivations before we start problem-solving, we prioritize the right problems to solve. This has led us to better business outcomes: a stronger product-market fit, differentiating innovation, and overall higher customer satisfaction.
Cheryl Couris
Senior Director of Design at Webex, Cisco
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In practice: Organizations that leverage user research to inform business strategies will see the full benefits of user research, transforming their insights into real business impact. On the whole, businesses that integrate research into business decisions see an improvement ratio of 2.7x compared to businesses that conduct research but rarely incorporate it into decision-making.
2. The majority of research teams are now using artificial intelligence (AI)
More product teams are embracing AI-powered tools to accelerate research as they recognize the time-savings and workflow improvements that coincide with AI adoption.
We found that 58% of respondents now use AI tools, with 37% applying AI in ‘some’ research projects and 21% in ‘most’ studies. This is a 32% increase from the 44% who reported using AI in our Future of User Research Report 2024.
When we asked respondents about the benefits they’ve experienced with AI, they cited improved team efficiency (58%), improved turnaround time of user research projects (57%), and optimized workflows (49%).
Using AI to analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and generate insights at scale is a game-changer. By automating these formerly laborious tasks, we free up headspace and bandwidth to go deeper into areas where only our human brain can make magic happen. On my team, we see AI as a co-pilot, not a replacement—using AI to augment research has helped us do more, faster.
Cheryl Couris
Senior Director of Design at Webex, Cisco
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In practice: AI-powered UX research will empower teams to maximize their time, allowing organizations to scale insights, accelerate decisions, and improve research ROI. By removing some of the more manual tasks and speeding up the ideation process, teams can shift their time to focus on the more strategic aspects of user research.
3. Mixed methods unite: User interviews and usability testing lead as the most common methods throughout the product lifecycle
User interviews (86%), usability testing (84%), and user surveys (77%) are the most popular user research methods across all role types, a trend consistent between our 2024 and 2025 report results.
By combining these methods, organizations gain a holistic view of the user experience and make decisions that inform the full user lifecycle.
In practice: Product and UX teams recognize the value of gathering both qualitative and quantitative data to gain a deeper understanding of user needs and preferences. Meanwhile, more specialized methods that provide deeper insights, such as focus groups and field studies, are primarily used by UX researchers.
4. Time-to-right: The push to build the right products fast is fueling research demand
Organizations are no longer focusing on time to market. Instead, teams are pivoting to deliver the right product faster than their competitors: time-to-right. As more companies recognize the value of user research to inform business decisions and build the right products quickly, we’re seeing the demand for user research surge.
In our 2024 report, 62% of respondents said demand for user insights grew. This year, we’re seeing similar trends, with 55% of product professionals saying demand for user research increased over the past year, 30% reporting no change, and 9% noting a decrease.
Many companies are seeing an increase in demand for research, but the economic climate has not supported the growth of user research teams in response.
Kate Pazoles
Senior Manager, User Research at Twilio
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Participant responses to: Why has the demand for user research increased?
- "Based on increasing customer feedback and impact on the business profits, it became clear that gathering and acting on user research is crucial for growth." – User Researcher, IC
- "The digital landscape is becoming crowded, making it harder for products to stand out. User research helps identify unique user needs and pain points, providing a competitive edge." – Designer, IC
In practice: Years of evangelizing research has undoubtedly paid off, as organizations increasingly look to research as a North Star. However, while PWDR appreciate the recognition of the value of user research, the increase in demand directly contributes to a top challenge that product teams face: time and bandwidth constraints.
5. Time and bandwidth remain the top challenges for product teams
Product teams experience time and bandwidth constraints (63%) as their top challenge, followed by recruiting the right participants (48%), and translating results into measurable business outcomes (42%).
Daniel Soranzo, Lead UX Researcher at GoodRX shares, “There’s a greater desire to get more done, faster. More research requests are coming in, and we’re using more tools to keep up. But with so many requests, I now have to say no to some projects.”
This year, I’ve noticed growing pressure to shorten research time early in the design process, with the expectation that it will lead to quicker solutions. Yet, rushing these early stages leads to revisiting decisions and prolongs the iteration process.
Bryanne Peterson
Global Head of Research and Strategy for the VCF Division at Broadcom
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In practice: Product teams are feeling the pressure to deliver more faster, but PWDR need to strike the balance between delivering projects faster and providing high-caliber research that can inform decision-making. To address these challenges and shorten the research cycle, teams are turning to AI to remove manual tasks and increase efficiency.
6. The number one use case for AI is automating manual research tasks
AI optimizes the most time-intensive components of research, including analyzing user research data (74%), transcription (58%), and planning and drafting research studies (50%).
AI supports both strategic initiatives (such as analyzing user research) as well as the creative aspects of research (with functionality like generating research questions and planning and drafting research studies), highlighting AI’s ability to support multiple components of the user research process.
Despite AI’s versatility and ability to speed up the research process, it is not a replacement for PWDR. By taking on manual tasks and streamlining workflows, AI offers teams time back in their day to access deeper, more actionable insights, but ultimately, it is the PWDR who drive innovation.
Cheryl Couris, Senior Director of Design at Webex, Cisco, affirms this sentiment, “On my team, we see AI as a co-pilot, not a replacement—using AI to augment research has helped us do more, faster.”
AI can become a really important tool in increasing and augmenting human capacity. It’s helpful as a decision-making tool, with the ability to assist in planning or to analyze large amounts of data. If we push for ethical behavior and appropriate safeguards, it’ll be like the switch from using paper to using computers.
Geordie Graham
Senior Manager of User Research at Simplii Financial
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In practice: AI can help teams brainstorm ideas, draft research questions, and pull themes from large swaths of data. While helpful in providing a starting point, AI’s outputs must be validated, edited, and adjusted by a person. Above all, the industry data assuages common concerns—clearly showing that AI is only playing a supporting role, and it cannot replace a researcher’s expertise.
7. The UX researcher role is shifting from technical executor to educator
Once mostly focused on executing research projects, UX research teams now play a critical role in championing customer-centricity throughout the product lifecycle and across the organization.
This is particularly true in emerging and enterprise organizations. We found that as companies grow, responsibility for research operation activities (such as recruiting research participants) decreases for UX researchers, with more focus taking place on strategic efforts like UX advocacy, stakeholder communication, and UX research strategy.
The role of the researcher has evolved to empower product teams and other stakeholders. This is a huge shift from the original definition of a UX researcher as a detective of problems to an ally of product teams capable of enabling more research and smooth decision-making for the product.
Shrut Kirti Saksena
Senior User Experience Researcher at Adobe
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In practice: At smaller organizations, researchers have to wear many hats and juggle a variety of responsibilities. This makes it more challenging to focus on high-impact, strategic projects. Larger organizations, on the other hand, typically have more resources to support research, giving UX teams more opportunities to be educators in their field.
For more insights from UX leaders and the evolving role of user research, explore our playbook, Embracing the Evolving Role of User Research.
8. User testing is a team sport: User research is a collective effort across teams
Many teams across organizations are conducting user research, including UX designers (70%), UX researchers (63%), product managers (42%), marketers (18%), CSMs (9%), and data analysts (6%).
To support non-researchers and help them effectively conduct research, product teams are providing resources such as access to user research tools (55%), support from UX researchers (50%), and research templates (49%).
Cheryl explains the positive impact the democratization of research has had on her organization, “We will continue to see more and more blurred lines between roles and a growing expectation that product designers take on cross-functional responsibilities, such as leading testing and customer engagement. In my experience, this has raised the bar for how we think about and execute high-quality user experiences.”
In practice: Scaling the impact of research by empowering everyone to play a more active role in research is an ongoing process. Check out our Scaling Research Playbook to learn how to successfully democratize research with insights from over 30 UX leaders.
The future of UX research
The future of research remains customer-centric and business-driven, with user research taking a larger role in informing both product and business decisions. As more teams see the value of user research, it will play an even more strategic role in high-impact business decisions. This shift in perception alongside the adoption of AI will open the door for product teams to transition into strategic leaders that move the needle.
Daniel Soranzo, Lead User Researcher at GoodRX, shares, “I'm excited to see how AI could help with tasks like prototyping or running interviews, and how our roles will evolve alongside AI. I’d like to think that because of AI we’re moving into more strategic roles beyond usability testing, which allow us to focus on higher visibility, higher-impact business decisions.”
Dive deeper into the trends shaping user research and uncover how product organizations transform user insights into business impact. On March 19, join us for a live webinar where our in-house experts will discuss the findings of Maze's 2025 Future of User Research Report.
