Let's celebrate the 2026 illumi award winners!

One researcher built an agentic, research-guided workflow. Full usability studies spun up in minutes, not days. Research stopped chasing design and started leading it. In a world where AI builds faster than ever, this is what it looks like to keep pace.

A small UX Research team trained 20 colleagues across the wider UX team, HR, and business readiness teams to run their own research and watched decisions transform. Category page visits grew 601%, engagement rose 168%, and . savings account openings increased 17%. When everyone listens to customers, everything moves faster.

The first U.S. auto retailer in the ChatGPT App Store, tested with real car shoppers before launch. One insight ("Smart Friend" over search tool) reframed their entire AI strategy. Now a 12-domain evaluation framework governs every AI conversation across the organization.

Testing 3,500+ customer interactions across 9+ journeys, AA turned a measurement tool into a transformation engine. Portfolio scores rose 14.7% to an all-time high of 79.8. AA Vacations jumped 40.3%. Quality gates now stand between every experience and launch.

A new Digital Insights team built a new research culture in one year, increasing UserTesting usage 10x. App NPS up 15 points. Stickiness up 26%. Commerce conversion up nearly a full percentage point. Built on one shift: from assumptions to actual guest behavior.

Informed decisions, design optimization, and coordinated campaign initiatives drove a significant uplift in Cathay Holidays bookings and Cathay membership engagement. Insights across two critical customer journeys revealed that the challenge was not demand, but clarity. Within two weeks, the team aligned stakeholders, enhanced the experience, and delivered measurable improvements at scale.

Three prototypes. Eight customers. One week. Rather than guessing which redesign worked best, Sage tested all three and cherry-picked the best elements. The result: transactions up 35% overall, 78% on mobile, and 51% among returning users. Now the blueprint for every major redesign.

300+ SKUs. 13 to 15% average sales uplift. 20% average conversion improvement. Ferrero replaced subjective creative decisions with a standardized Content Quality Score, tested with real consumers before launch, validated in-market, and scaled globally. Simpler content won. Every time.

They were building for the wrong customers and didn't know it. A UserTesting panel revealed an entirely new segment and repositioned three digital solutions around simpler data decisions. Result: 7% above revenue expectations in 2025, and 3x fewer research dead-ends.

An industry-first fee removal. A high-profile advertising  campaign. And a 48-hour feedback loop that caught comprehension gaps before they killed the momentum. Insights went straight to Creative Studio. Product made surgical fixes. An industry-disrupting launch protected at its most vulnerable moment.

KQED’s public media app stuck in the low 3-star range became a 4.9-star daily habit. Monthly installs up 66%. Repeat usage from 35% to 88%. Live radio streams up 600%. A nonprofit used human understanding to build what most commercial apps can't.

One researcher. 8,000 employees. A 100-person super user network running 1,000+ studies in a year. Hidden harms fixed before go-live. Complaints down. A chatbot bug caught that QA missed entirely. Scale built from scratch by one person with a mission.

69 million members. The lowest NPS in the category. Nearly half never earned a reward. UserTesting revealed that "surprise and delight" felt random and unfair. A transparency-first redesign lifted reward redemptions 50%, increased average check, and turned a legacy program into a growth driver.

69 million members. The lowest NPS in the category. Nearly half never earned a reward. UserTesting revealed that "surprise and delight" felt random and unfair. A transparency-first redesign lifted reward redemptions 50%, increased average check, and turned a legacy program into a growth driver.

Analytics showed where customers were dropping off. UserTesting showed why. Unclear promotions, confusing fulfillment, checkout friction: all uncovered and fixed through rapid studies. Result: roughly 10-point reduction in checkout abandonment, roughly 9-point increase in Order & Collect adoption, and a continuous optimization engine.

"Help me save more money" turned out to mean: help me leave. Help me survive. Deep moderated interviews revealed savings as a life behavior shaped by relationships and hardship. The product that followed moved monthly retail savings deposits from $3.64M to $4.28M.

Regulatory insurance language customers couldn't understand, with Legal, Underwriting, UX, and Product all pulling in different directions. Video of real customers failing in real time did what no slide deck could. Legal agreed to plain-English alternatives. Post-launch ease score: 6.28 out of 7.

A 7-step pre-purchase flow was breaking the "tap and go" promise of a credit card. Iterative UserTesting collapsed it to a single, intuitive step, eliminating confusion, distrust, and friction. A high-friction experience became a scalable growth unlock before it ever launched.

Merging two deeply loyal customer bases into one app, with one chance to get it right. Rapid iterative testing caught brand misinterpretation and trust erosion before launch. Even the seat map color palette took multiple rounds. Launches April 2026. Loyalty earned, not assumed.

Navigation was failing customers at the basics: find my bill, check broadband, upgrade a service. Findability sat at 44%. Five rounds of tree testing and card sorting later: 93 to 98% findability. Time to find halved. One IA principle now scales across every surface.

Nine months with an agency: 8 studies, 93 participants. Six months with UserTesting: 108 studies, 3,137 participants, a 34x increase in reach. Continuous embedded insight replaced periodic validation. Fewer design iterations. Faster delivery. Stakeholders aligned. Scale changed everything.

Three waves of competitive UX benchmarking against Zillow and others, and the data moved the roadmap. A single CTA finding triggered a statistically significant lead lift. Mortgage calculator redesign funded. Went from 3rd place to #1 in guidance and insights.

One researcher. No budget. No dev team. Four weeks. Built a scoring system measuring every digital journey against usability, cognitive load, and regulatory signals. More than 30 journeys were scored. Senior leaders who had never engaged with UX data now ask to be in the queue.

Three revenue bleeds fixed through continuous UserTesting: fulfillment errors, forced service removals, and conflicting delivery messaging. Split payments alone drove an increase of 71.4% service agreement orders and £1.4M annual revenue. Clearer fulfillment messaging recovered an estimated £32M in incremental revenue.

A legacy payment-only app became a full financial tool, with FICO tracking, home value monitoring, and AI-powered research dashboards that sold the C-suite on scaling UserTesting enterprise-wide. Research didn't just inform the product. It became the executive briefing.

Research changed how AT&T builds. Not just informing decisions — driving them. A new same-day delivery experience, shaped by real customers at every stage, validated end-to-end before launch. When it went live, there were no surprises. Only confirmed expectations.

Over 50 research reports. 5M+ euros in declared research impact. Increased CSAT by 9 points from stakeholders. Spain's flagship airline used human insight to make its biggest strategic bets: fleet retrofits, inflight connectivity, new corporate segments. One of the clearest research-as-strategy stories in aviation.