UserTesting named a leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026
Experience research is evolving rapidly—becoming more continuous, more collaborative, and more deeply embedded in how enterprises design, build, and make decisions.
As teams across product, design, marketing, and CX seek faster access to trusted customer insights, the capabilities of experience research platforms matter more than ever. That’s why we’re proud to share that UserTesting has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026.
“We believe being named a Leader reflects the trust enterprises place in UserTesting to help them understand real customer perspectives and act on them with confidence,” said Baran Erkel, Chief Strategy Officer at UserTesting. “As experience research evolves in the AI era, our focus remains on delivering high-quality participant access, speed, and flexibility while embedding customer insight more deeply into our users' daily workflows.”
As Forrester notes, in the past, Experience Research Platforms (XRPs) offered specialized capabilities, such as usability studies or live interviews, and were mainly used by professional researchers. Today, XRPs support continuous research for a broader range of roles, including researchers, designers, CX professionals, marketers, and product managers. As research has become more cross-functional and collaborative–spanning multiple altitudes from tactical to strategic–XRPs struggle to meet all these needs within a single platform. To address these challenges and improve efficiency, vendors are turning to AI, and how well a platform uses it to support planning, execution, and analysis is a key differentiator. We agree with this assessment, and it is precisely this evolution that is guiding our product strategy and recent investments.
Over the past year, we have focused on strengthening the foundation of enterprise-grade experience research: best-in-class panel quality, unmatched recruitment speed, flexibility across research types, and trust at scale. These strengths remain core to why many of the world’s largest organizations rely on UserTesting. At the same time, we are accelerating innovation to meet growing expectations for AI-assisted research and broader customer insight capabilities.
Several recent developments reflect how we are addressing these needs.
First, our acquisition of User Interviews meaningfully expands our research capabilities, particularly for premium B2B, niche, and hard-to-reach audiences, as well as live interviews and longitudinal research programs. Together, UserTesting and User Interviews create the most comprehensive participant ecosystems in the market—combining global reach with enterprise-ready participant management, custom panel creation, and the capabilities teams need to deliver continuous insights over time. This strengthens one of the most critical inputs to high-quality insight: consistently hearing from the right people, at the right time, with the control and continuity enterprises require.
Second, we are applying AI across the research lifecycle to make research faster and easier, while maintaining the quality and reliability enterprises expect. Our UserTesting for Figma plug-in embeds human insight directly into design workflows, allowing teams to use AI to generate test plans in seconds, launch studies, and act on feedback without leaving Figma. This reflects a broader shift in our roadmap: bringing customer feedback into everyday work so teams can validate ideas earlier and move forward with confidence.
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Third, we have introduced team-based, unlimited pricing to make it easier for enterprises to scale research across roles, teams, and geographies. By removing usage-based limits, teams no longer have to restrict how often they test or what questions they explore. Predictable pricing provides budgeting clarity while enabling broader use of customer insight across product, design, and marketing teams.
The business value of this approach is reflected in an August 2025 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study commissioned by UserTesting, which found that a composite organization based on interviewed customers using the platform achieved a 415% return on investment over three years. This outcome was driven by faster time to insight, reduced rework, and improved decision quality across product, design, and research teams—underscoring the tangible impact of embedding customer insights earlier and more consistently at enterprise scale.
Our purpose is simple: to help enterprises understand their customers’ perspectives and make better decisions as a result. We do this by offering a suite of products that quickly deliver authentic customer insights on which enterprises can rely. Guided by that purpose, we take customer feedback seriously and continue to invest in platform usability, organizational scalability, and ease of doing business—based directly on how our customers work and where they encounter challenges.
As experience research becomes more AI-assisted, more continuous, and more embedded across teams and daily workflows, we believe leadership will belong to platforms that combine speed with trust, innovation with stability, and flexibility with scale. We are proud of the impact our customers are achieving with UserTesting, and even more focused on helping them succeed as their needs continue to evolve.
As experience research continues to scale across organizations and adapt to an AI-assisted future, we remain focused on what matters most: helping teams hear directly from the right customers, at the right time, and act with confidence. We’re grateful to Forrester for its perspective and to our customers for the partnership and feedback that shape our platform every day. We look forward to continuing to support enterprises as they embed customer insights more deeply into their workflows and decision-making, both today and into the future.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .
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