Keep your team lean without limiting your research
Give your existing research team the extra capacity and specialist expertise it needs as priorities change, without adding permanent headcount. Built for high-tech enterprises.
Validate ideas before engineering starts, so you invest in features customers will actually use—not ones they never asked for.
Evaluative & usability research
Find usability problems before your customers do
See where people struggle, hesitate, or give up while the product is still easy to change, avoiding support tickets, bad reviews, and costly post-launch fixes.
Quantitative & psychometric research
Prove what improved
Measure changes in trust, usability, and adoption with data leadership can confidently use to evaluate product decisions and future investment.
Human factors, HTI & wearables research
Reduce returns before your product ships
Test devices with real people in real conditions to uncover comfort, fit, and usability issues before they become returns, warranty claims, or redesigns.
AI & hybrid product research
Turn AI features into products people actually use
Identify the trust and workflow problems that stop people relying on AI, so your investment becomes part of their daily work instead of being quietly abandoned.
Accessibility & inclusive research
Build products more people can use
Include participants with disabilities from the start, uncovering accessibility barriers early enough to improve the product instead of documenting problems after launch.
Get more research done without growing your team. Instead of hiring specialists you’ll only need for certain projects, Akraya gives you access to the right expertise when you need it. Multiple studies can run at the same time, helping your product teams move faster without increasing your permanent research team.
Per sprint
Rapid research
Your UXR lead scopes the study and hands it over. Akraya recruits the participants, runs the sessions, and returns findings while the decision is still open. Most accounts start here and widen from there.
One to three weeks from brief to findings
Runs on software and on hardware
Nobody added to your weekly meetings
Best forteams with internal capacity but more research than they can handle.
A dedicated researcher joins your team for the length of a program. Because they carry what they learn into the next study, your research strategy compounds instead of restarting.
Engagements run three months, six months, or across a year
One researcher can run several studies in parallel
Scoped and delivered against agreed outcomes
Best forteams that need more capacity without hiring more people.
A programme that needs an embedded researcher one quarter and fast-turnaround studies the next usually means two vendors, two contracts and two ramp-ups. Akraya covers both under a single PMO, giving you one team that scales as your priorities change.
The right specialist for every study
Not every research study needs the same kind of researcher. Akraya matches each project with specialists whose experience fits the problem you’re trying to solve, instead of assigning whoever happens to be available.
A consistent team that learns your product
Good research gets better over time because researchers learn your product, your users, and your business. That’s why we keep teams consistent throughout an engagement, so each study builds on what came before instead of starting from scratch.
Research that scales as your roadmap changes
Product priorities change, new questions appear, studies expand, and others are cancelled. Akraya is built to adapt quickly, so adding specialist expertise, changing scope, or starting a new study does not slow down your roadmap.
Add researchers to your team. Your organization still owns the research strategy, study design, analysis, and recommendations. You gain capacity, but not ownership.
Akraya
UX Research-as-a-Service
Scale research without giving up ownership. A dedicated team takes responsibility for the study from design through recommendations while flexing capacity as your roadmap changes. You get specialist expertise without building a larger internal team.
Boutique UX research agencies
Hand the study to specialists. You get deep expertise and end-to-end ownership, but capacity is limited. As demand grows, studies queue up and additional vendors are often needed.
From our clients
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Their responsiveness, attention to detail, and collaborative approach have made them a valued extension of our team.
eBay
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Akraya’s excellent customer service is quick to respond to our requests. They are one of our most valued suppliers.
PayPal
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Consistent delivery starts with strong partnerships and Akraya’s makes a real difference.
CDW PMO Team
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Their team has demonstrated exceptional responsiveness and a genuine commitment to understanding CDW’s unique requirements.
CDW PMO Team
Where to start
A scoping call, before a proposal
You do not need a research plan to get in touch. Most engagements begin with a conversation about what the team actually needs, and that call covers four things.
What decision is waiting on evidence, and when it has to be made
What has already been measured, and what those signals suggest
Which research discipline the question actually calls for
Whether rapid research or an embedded researcher fits, and what a first engagement would cover
Book a scoping call
Thirty minutes with a research lead. No research plan needed — bring the decision that is waiting on evidence.
With staff augmentation you receive researchers, and your team keeps the research question, the study design, the methodology, the analysis, and the recommendation. Akraya's engagements include the delivery structure above the researchers: PMO oversight, methodology set by PhD-level specialists, and ownership of the study from scoping through findings.
The practical difference shows up when something goes wrong. In an augmentation arrangement, a study that produces unusable data is your problem to diagnose.
How are engagements structured and priced?+
Two structures cover engagements: rapid research on a study your team has scoped, or embedded researchers who join the team for the length of a programme. Most accounts begin with one product team and expand from there.
Cost is driven by the delivery model, the number of researchers, the seniority the work requires, and how hard the participants are to recruit. The scoping call establishes which structure fits before any figure is quoted.
Is Akraya as strong as a specialist UX research agency?+
On depth in a single method, a good boutique is a real competitor and worth evaluating. Akraya's advantage is depth across several domains at once — hardware, software, AI, and wearables inside one practice — combined with the capacity to run several studies in parallel rather than queuing them.
The clearest way to judge it is to ask who will run your study and look at what comparable engagements returned.
How does this compare with a traditional creative or design agency?+
Design agencies are built around producing design output, and research is often a phase inside that. Akraya's practice is research-led, and the deliverable is a finding a product team can act on. Engagements also flex when the question changes, where a fixed-scope agreement usually has to be renegotiated first.
How quickly can a researcher get up to speed on a complex product?+
Faster than a new hire and faster than a generalist pulled from a bench, because researchers are matched to the product context instead of assigned by availability. On one enterprise programme, time-to-productivity for a new researcher went from eight weeks to fourteen days. Reusable study frameworks and institutional knowledge held inside the account are what make that repeatable.
What happens if a researcher leaves partway through an engagement?+
Continuity is a delivery obligation instead of an individual one. The PMO holds the study plan, the documentation, and the account context, so a replacement researcher steps into an engagement that has already been written down. Teams are kept stable deliberately, because handoffs are where knowledge is usually lost.
How is research quality maintained compared with a full-time employee?+
Through standardized protocols and methodology set by senior specialists. On hardware engagements, protocols exist specifically to prevent the methodology failures that make results non-comparable between studies. A full-time employee brings product context that compounds over years, which is why most organizations end up running an internal team and a partner together.
How is AI used in the research process?+
It is used where it improves speed without weakening the finding: heuristic evaluations, analysis pipelines, survey processing, and helping a researcher ramp on an unfamiliar product. Synthesis, participant interaction, and the delivery of findings stay with the researcher, because those steps depend on judgement. AI-assisted heuristic evaluation has cut baseline reporting time roughly in half while holding to human-expert accuracy.
Can you research a product that has not been announced?+
Yes. Unbranded research is one of the more common reasons enterprise teams come to Akraya, specifically to protect IP on early-stage prototypes. Where an engagement requires it, the work runs inside your own systems so research data stays in your environment.
Can you recruit specialized or hard-to-reach participants?+
Yes, and recruitment is usually the longest part of a timeline. Niche professional populations, hardware users, and globally distributed samples are slow and expensive to reach with an internal team. Akraya runs recruitment and participant payment as part of the engagement, drawing on its own participant database, and can staff local teams in the markets where your product lives.
