Best UX Research Agencies (2026)

Founded in 2009, Isadora Agency designs and builds websites and products, and its projects for mid-market and enterprise organizations start with research. The practice combines audience research, competitive benchmarking, analytics auditing, user interviews, focus groups, card sorting and stakeholder workshops, and designs are tested in moderated sessions with real users. For Brookfield Residential, a homebuilder and land developer, Isadora has run a multi-year UX partnership. Research with teams across the US and Canada shaped a design system that scales across regions and an interactive community map. For Smith, an electronic components distributor, a competitor review and stakeholder interviews produced the personas and user journeys behind a new site built to earn buyers' trust and route them to sales.

Designit has belonged to Wipro since 2015 and traces its start to 1991, and it works from studios in cities that include Copenhagen, Madrid, Munich, Oslo and Seattle. Design research is one of its named offerings, and it covers users and the wider ecosystem around them before design begins. When a Japanese online bank wanted to serve expatriates, Designit's team combined desk research with interviews to learn what foreign residents expect from banks in Japan and which currencies they use, then shaped an English account-opening app and an informational website around three findings. For WHYY, the public media organization behind the radio show Fresh Air, the team interviewed listeners and other podcast creators, then tested new product ideas for the show's archive with financial models and a survey.

EY Studio+ is EY's customer experience, marketing, sales and service practice, launched in June 2025. For SkiStar, which runs ski resorts in Scandinavia, the team ran strategy workshops that reached every full-time employee as well as its leadership, and SkiStar later signed up families to test new activities. For an unnamed investment advisor building a self-guided investing journey, a studio team of strategists, writers, developers, product owners, researchers and interface designers mapped customer journeys and evaluated the product's copy. Its client work also includes a brand and launch campaign for a men's fertility company and the launch of a sustainable direct-to-consumer brand.

Teague is a design company founded in 1926 and fully employee-owned. The expertise listed for its road usage work covers ethnography, market research and analysis, user and stakeholder interviews, and user experience research. For five years its researchers and designers have worked with the engineering firm CDM Smith and several state transportation departments to study a road usage charge, a pay-per-mile alternative to the gas tax. The Kansas project was qualitative research meant to give residents a voice before any pilot. It opened with strategy workshops in which agency stakeholders agreed on what the study should learn and whom it should learn from, and participants then worked through a toolkit that let them design their own version of the policy step by step.

Ciklum's team mixes engineers with experience designers, consultants, CX researchers and product strategists. For a trading app that served both consumers and investors, Ciklum ran a two-phase, mixed-method research program. In-depth interviews and usability tests came first, to understand each group's habits and unmet needs, and a survey and three rounds of desk research followed to check the findings at scale. On Bytes' B2B marketplace, the company embedded a user researcher in the product team to run in-depth interviews and concept tests that shape the roadmap.

Tangity is the design studio network of NTT DATA, which opened its Spanish hubs in 2024. Its services list includes user research, inclusive design, accessibility, service design and product design. In aida, a non-profit research project from its Milan studio with NTT DATA, the team set out to design for children with autism spectrum disorder. It combined desk and field research with close work alongside people who live with the condition, then used that research to design a dataset that kept human biases out of the AI model. The result was a kit and an app that give parents and educators information about a child's status and suggest ways to communicate.

EPAM Continuum is the consulting and design arm of EPAM, the software engineering company. Its service menu links to Transformative Research and Insights, which covers customer research, resonance and usability testing labs, a research center of excellence and help for companies building in-house research teams. That work runs through the EPAM Global Research Institute, which studies sources such as biometrics and market signals. On the design side, EPAM Continuum redesigned the brand and customer experience of XKD and added new service touchpoints for its customers, and its client work also lists MAPCO and Vue.

Nielsen Norman Group was founded in 1998 by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman and is led today by Kara Pernice as president and CEO. Its consulting arm sells research and assessment alongside training. A rapid user test typically involves five to 10 users over three days of moderated sessions, with the client's team observing and a report of prioritized recommendations at the end. Competitive tests compare a product side by side with rivals, and quantitative studies run with 20 to 200 users over one to four weeks to set benchmarks. Customized research studies questions such as user motivation and conversion problems. More complex studies with several audiences or designs usually run $80,000 to $150,000.