Company:
CustomTester
Year:
2026
Duration:
In Progress
Overview
CustomTester is an AI-powered UX research platform that helps product teams plan studies, recruit participants, conduct usability testing, and transform research sessions into actionable insights. Rather than treating research as a collection of disconnected tools, CustomTester brings the entire workflow into a single collaborative workspace.
As Co-Founder and Product Designer, I have led the product from concept to MVP by defining the product vision, conducting customer discovery, designing the end-to-end experience, establishing the design system, and shaping the AI workflows that power the platform. The product is currently being built and validated through ongoing customer feedback and iterative design.
Problem
UX research remains fragmented across numerous tools for planning, recruiting, testing, analysis, documentation, and competitor research. Product teams often spend as much time organizing research as they do learning from users.
Existing enterprise platforms can be expensive and overly complex for smaller teams, while lightweight usability testing tools rarely provide the intelligence needed to guide product decisions beyond individual studies. AI has the potential to accelerate research, but many current solutions simply summarize transcripts instead of actively helping teams plan, execute, and synthesize research.
The challenge was to design a platform that simplifies the entire research process while using AI to augment—not replace—the expertise of researchers and product designers.
Solution
I designed CustomTester as an AI-native UX research platform that supports the complete research lifecycle. Researchers can create usability tests, surveys, card sorts, AI-assisted studies, and first-impression evaluations within a unified workspace. Participants complete studies through a streamlined experience while screen recordings, transcripts, and behavioral data are automatically collected.
AI is integrated throughout the platform to reduce manual work instead of replacing research decisions. The system assists with generating study plans, creating interview questions, analyzing recordings, identifying usability issues, comparing competitor experiences, generating personas, and synthesizing findings into actionable reports.
Beyond individual studies, the platform introduces shared workspace intelligence through reusable audiences, product context, evidence libraries, and competitor tracking. This allows teams to build organizational knowledge over time rather than treating every research project as an isolated effort.
As the product continues toward launch, customer discovery and iterative validation remain central to the design process. Every major workflow is refined through feedback before implementation to ensure the platform solves real research challenges while remaining approachable for teams of all sizes.
