The Top 5 Marvin UX Research Products in 2023

The Marvin UX Research Product Galaxy has come a long way, baby. 

Since launching out of stealth mode less than two years ago, Marvin has made a big dent in the research universe.

Marvin’s #1 goal is to make your job easier with the research tools and UX workflows you’ve always wanted.

So without further ado…we present to you a look back at the best Marvin UX research product launches of 2023.

The Top 5 Marvin UX Research Products of 2023

Out of 100+ new product releases, it’s hard to choose favorites. But these were the top 5 game-changers, according to our users:

1. Ask AI: ChatGPT for Research
2. Our Powerful Survey Engine for Qualitative Insights at Scale 
3. Discover Research Hub
4. An End-to-End AI Research Assistant
5. Virtual Research Backrooms

Let’s chat through each Marvin product in more detail…

Marvin’s “Ask AI”: ChatGPT for Research

What if all search just worked like Google? With Marvin, it does. 

We were one of the first software companies to roll out updated search functionality in 2023. (Probably no surprise to you if you know that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of our biggest investors.)

Just ask any question to search your entire repository of research data and get an answer in seconds. Don’t want to look at everything at once? That’s easy to do too: You can use Ask AI to drill into single interviews or projects for hidden context.

Here’s a quick demonstration of how it works:

Ask AI is our most powerful search product to date. Get the answers you need within your research in a matter of seconds. 

Even better — Marvin’s AI gets smarter every time you use it. 

Marvin’s Powerful Survey Engine for Qualitative Insights at Scale 

Marvin can now handle large datasets of quantitative and qualitative data with our brand-new survey engine.

Within a month of launching this product, a major restaurant brand shared these outcomes with us.

Thanks to Marvin’s survey engine, the research team has:

• Automated weeks of analysis to less than 1 hour
• Uncovered consumer trends & themes across 12,000+ survey responses they wouldn’t have found manually 
• Improve quality of survey questions to generate more specific user feedback (such as “artificial taste” & “inconsistent texture”)

Marvin’s survey functionality allows you to analyze open-ended responses effectively, with AI summarization and thematic analysis that saves hours of manual work. 

Users can import survey data, and the AI automatically identifies key themes, providing visual graphs to easily understand the distribution of responses.

This powerful product streamlines the process of filtering and organizing qualitative data, making it actionable and insightful for the teams. 

We support integration with various survey platforms, such as Pendo, Qualtrics and Google Forms.

Discover Research Hub

A better way to share research data with stakeholders was our most-requested feature of the year. Thanks (as always) to user feedback, the enhanced viewer experience that’s searchable, centralized & incredibly intuitive.

“Discover Research” is a research repository within your research repository, tailored to a non-researcher audience.

With Discover Research, you no longer have to play gatekeeper. Anyone with a viewer license* can:

• Discover and share insights from a centralized location 
• Search the way they want rather than knowing complex taxonomy
• Surface key data points and customer quotes in seconds
• Find answers to complex questions exactly when they need them

In combination with Ask AI, Discover Research is making it easier than ever for researchers to prove value at the highest level. 

*A customizable Viewer experience is available for Marvin teams on our Enterprise or Standard plan. If you’d like to learn more, please schedule time with our team.

An End-to-End AI Research Assistant

In a year of heartbreaking layoff announcements, we leaned heavily into helping researchers do more with less. 

Of course, that means more ways of freeing you from important tedious tasks. 

A recent customer review shared how our AI research assistant was critical to improving her workflows: 

“Marvin integrates AI better than any other tool I’ve seen in the research market — I like their prompting approach because I can develop and write my own insights and it will pull quotes that support or don’t — it allows me to do the higher level synthesis and use AI as an assistant to dot my i’s, get representative quotes, and check my bias.”

Here are 3 main benefits of our research assistant:

• Automatic notes during and after your user interviews
• Annotate faster with new AI synthesis
• Distill hours of conversation in a matter of seconds with AI summaries

We introduced the AI research assistant to help you with analysis too!

You can now organize and analyze large datasets to highlight key patterns and trends without manual coding. We now have three in-depth (yet automated) reports you can run on your data:

• Thematic Analysis: Quantify your qualitative data and automatically group key themes.
• Trend Analysis: Identify emerging trends across all your notes so you can better inform your product roadmap.
• Sentiment Analysis: Measure emotions to truly understand how users feel about your product.

Virtual Research Backrooms

Ever wish you could invite your whole team to watch a live interview or focus group like we used to in the pre-Zoom research days?

Now you can. Marvin makes it easy to add non-researchers to your sessions. Our virtual research background lets you stream interviews live without distracting the interviewer or participant.

We love this product, but we’ve been blown away by how many users LOVE it. 

Why? Because Marvin backrooms increase the reach of user research and engage a larger audience. It’s also the gold standard for elevating your customer voice in real time. 

In combination with our live AI note-taker, users can simultaneously take time-stamped notes during the call for enhanced understanding and retention.

Streaming live interviews saves time and resources in content creation, enabling a quicker turnaround from recording to broadcasting. The unedited nature of live interviews gives the audience a more genuine view of the user’s feedback, which can enhance credibility and trust.

Even More UX Research Product Enhancements

Here are a few more user favorites from last year. 

We continue to make the user experience more visually appealing. So it’s no surprise that the designers using Marvin have raved about:

• Enhanced visual workflows with Canvas Whiteboarding.
• Different formats of graphs, like Chord and bar graphs

Marvin is one of the only UX products that lets you export and download data. We want to make your job easier and faster. Period. That means, we know it’s sometimes easier and faster to work outside of Marvin. We will never block you from accessing and storing your files somewhere else.

Improved PII features. Improved video editing. Multiple discussion guides for your interviews.

And of course, our AI Note-Taker. We’re cheating a little by mentioning here since Live Notes has been a core part of Marvin since Day 1. But we’re seeing a big uptick in the amount of people using it to speed up their user interview workflow.

Customer Love For Marvin UX Research Products

I shared your favorite Marvin’s UX research products in the last year. Now it’s my turn:

My favorite part is hearing directly from you.

And in winter 2023, we were recognized as the only research repository leader on G2. (We also scored highly in the User Research and Insights Engine categories.)

According to the website, “G2 is the largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 90 million people annually—including employees at all Fortune 500 companies—use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews.”

Thank you for championing Marvin to other researchers, designers and product managers with your unbiased feedback.

Expert UX Research & Design Advice in 2023

We can’t help but gush about the people who join us on the Marvin stage every month. 

AI experts from Google and Microsoft, product leaders from S&P Global and LINQ, design disruptors at Fidelity and Lattice, published authors, leading research consultants… 

We wrote a whole article based on conversations with UX leaders around our community. 

ICYMI, here are the top themes:

1. Speak the same language as your stakeholder. This is non-negotiable — it came up every single time.
2. Change is inevitable. Lean on your design thinking skill set, and help peers across your org be more solution-focused.
3. Design & research roles are also changing. Time to rethink your priorities.  

Onward to UX in 2024

Where do we go from here? As the iconic author Douglas Adams once wrote… 

“You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy’s a fun place. You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.” 

We’re having a good time mapping out the Marvin research roadmap. All of our product enhancements come directly from user interviews. 

You can expect to see…

• AI updates that make impossible tasks possible for the first time
• More integrations with tools you and your peers love
• Internal communication features to make it even easier to share research insights
• Continued focus on privacy and ethics when using AI in research 
• Meet us in-person at conferences around the world (starting with ConveyUX in Seattle)

If you want to see a sneak peek, book a demo with our team. 

And if you’d prefer to stay high level, check out Jared Erondu’s predictions for UX research and design in 2024.

So long, and thanks for the fish!