Refine every experience you build.
We help teams around the world understand their users and size up their markets. Rigorous research, plainly reported, plus our own UX Score for tracking it all.
- Remote-first, worldwide
- UX plus market research
- End-to-end delivery
Small agency. Serious research.
We are a small team of researchers who care an unreasonable amount about evidence. UX studies, market research, brand tests: we run them for companies anywhere, from kitchen-table startups to teams with entire floors.
Good research should not need a giant budget. We stay fully remote, keep our rates low, and stick with you from the first question to the final readout.
More about usWhat is UX Refinery?
An independent research agency, remote-first from South Africa and working with teams worldwide.
UX studies and market research, from usability tests and interviews to market sizing and brand testing, reported back plainly with ranked recommendations. No design work. No development. No agenda.
Do you do market research as well as UX?
Yes, and they belong together. Market research sizes the opportunity and maps the competition. UX research checks whether people can actually use what you build for it. Run them with separate suppliers and you get separate reports that quietly contradict each other, leaving you to referee. One team means the two halves join up before they ever reach your desk. See the full service list.
Guessing is the most expensive strategy.
Every untested assumption ships inside the product. Some of them are wrong, and wrong at scale costs real money: rebuilds, refunds, users who leave quietly and never tell you why.
Research is cheaper. We find the wrong assumptions early, while they are still cheap to fix, and hand you the evidence to decide what happens next.
Explore our approachFour constructs that define great experiences.
We grade every experience on four constructs first described by Google. Four scores, one honest picture, and a clear sense of what to fix first.
Usability
Can people get things done without swearing at the screen? Instructions, flows, buttons that say what they mean. The basics, which are never basic.
Equity
Does it work for everyone, or just for people like you? Age, ability, background, a phone from 2019. Fairness is not a feature. It is the whole point.
Enjoyment
The feeling stuff. Is it pleasant? Satisfying, even? Nobody recommends a product that works but bores them. We measure the delight, or the absence of it.
Usefulness
The bluntest question of the four: does this actually help anyone? A usable, fair, delightful product that solves nothing is still a failure.
A full toolkit for understanding your users.
Usability tests, market studies, our own UX Score, and research for AI products that people need to trust. One team, the whole toolkit.
Moderated usability tests
Real users work through your product while one of our researchers watches quietly and asks questions at the right moments. You find out exactly where people stumble, and most teams leave with a fix list they can start on that same week.
In-depth interviews
A proper conversation, one on one, in person or over a call. People reveal motivations, workarounds, and quiet frustrations in these chats that never show up in your analytics.
Market research & sizing
How big is the opportunity, really? We size markets, map competitors, and talk to the very people you hope to win over, so your next move rests on numbers that hold up.
Surveys
Good surveys are harder than they look. One leading question and the whole dataset leans. We design, field, and analyse surveys that ask clean questions of the right people, then tell you what the answers actually mean.
User segmentation
Not everyone wants the same thing from you. We build segments from demographics, attitudes, and behaviour, with a bit of machine learning doing the heavy lifting, so you can stop designing for everyone at once.
Brand & concept testing
Got a name, a logo, or a campaign idea you are half in love with? Test it before you print it. We put concepts in front of the right people and find out what lands, what confuses, and what quietly offends.
Let's talk
Ready to stop guessing?
Tell us what you're trying to figure out. We'll design the study that answers it: UX, market, or both.