User Studies Overview
A User Study puts your Personas in front of your product and reports how they react. It’s qualitative research without the recruiting: Marketrix runs Simulations as your personas and gathers their reactions.
User Studies live on the User Studies page, scoped to the Application you’re working in. There is no separate research destination — everything below happens here.
The three study types
Section titled “The three study types”Every study is one of three types. They share the same run model and differ only in what you give them and what they return.
| Type | You provide | You get back |
|---|---|---|
| UX Research | A research question | Where personas felt clear versus confused, as findings backed by their own words |
| A/B Study | A goal question and two variant URLs | Which variant converts better, and why |
| Survey | A link to a real form | Per-persona answers, plus where they agree and diverge |
Creating a study
Section titled “Creating a study”Each type has the same three-step create flow:
- Describe your study — Write the research question, the goal question and two variant URLs, or the survey link. Choose the personas that will participate.
- Review the draft — Marketrix drafts the structure for you (browser tasks and questions for UX Research, the goal-tailored question set for an A/B Study, the instructions for a Survey). Edit anything before you commit.
- Launch — Run it and watch the results land.
You can also attach context for Marketrix to ground its work in: a file you upload, existing Knowledge, your prior Simulations, or new Simulations it suggests. Reusing existing simulations is cheaper on quota; running new ones tends to produce better-grounded results.
How a run works
Section titled “How a run works”Each time you run a study it produces a run, and a study keeps its run history so you can compare results over time. A run moves through a shared lifecycle — running → finalizing → completed (or failed / stopped) — and while it runs you can watch the simulations replay live.
Every simulation in a run produces a Persona Reaction: what that persona made of each step and how it felt about it. Once every persona has finished, Marketrix folds those reactions — plus each persona’s own answers — into per-persona findings and a single run-level summary. The type-specific output is layered on top.
From a study you can:
- Switch runs — Compare the current run against earlier runs of the same study.
- Read per-persona results — See each persona’s reactions and the type-specific output.
- Replay — Follow the linked simulation replays and jump to the moment tied to a persona’s reaction.
- Export — Generate a PDF report of a completed run, or export the responses as CSV.
What each type returns
Section titled “What each type returns”UX Research
Section titled “UX Research”Personas perform neutral tasks in your app, then answer your research questions in character. The run returns per-persona key findings — each a claim backed by attributed quotes — folded into one plain-language answer to your research question, alongside how often personas dropped off and where friction typically peaked.
A/B Study
Section titled “A/B Study”Personas experience both variants and vote on which they prefer. On top of that vote, Marketrix scores every simulated user on how likely they are to convert on each variant. The conversion rate — the mean per-user conversion probability — is what the winner is decided on. It’s reported per variant with a confidence interval, the probability that one variant beats the other, and the recurring reasons users gave for going through with it or not.
Friction is a secondary read, not the verdict: how likely each persona was to abandon a variant, and the step where friction peaked.
A variant is only crowned when the browsing record actually separated the two. If it didn’t — or if the run carries no conversion layer at all — the result falls back to the plain persona vote and says so, without naming a winner. Every run also ends with ranked recommendations and the risks of shipping each variant.
The Simulated Users view lists the individual judgement behind every count: one row per simulated user, with which variants it converted on and why.
Survey
Section titled “Survey”Personas open a real form you link to, read it as it is actually rendered, and fill it in in character — each answer with a short justification. The run returns every persona’s answers, per-question agreement (where personas converged and where they split), and, for choice-based questions, the trade-offs behind their picks.