Research Studio
Research Studio is an AI-powered UX research analysis tool that turns interview transcripts, surveys and documents into summaries, insights, sentiment, personas and user journeys, through draggable widgets and a chat locked to your own uploaded sources.
What is Research Studio?
Research Studio is a web application that automates the analysis stage of user and customer research. It is published by Black Device SRL, a Romanian company run by two product designers who built it for smaller businesses whose UX and marketing budgets could not stretch to the weeks of manual synthesis that research normally demands. It opened in public beta on 21 May 2023 and left beta on 23 June 2023.
The workflow is deliberately short. You create a project, give it a name and an optional description of the subject, then upload your material. The help centre lists CSV, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX, PPTX and PDF; the homepage adds video and audio, claiming 8+ formats in 99+ languages. Quantitative and qualitative files can sit side by side in one project as long as they concern the same topic. The analysis then runs on its own, in anywhere from a few seconds to around 45 seconds. Nothing has to be prompted: the site's own line is No prompts. No hustle.
What comes back first is a summary, a set of insights and an overall sentiment. From there you drop widgets onto a canvas to go further: Personas, Jobs to be Done, Statements for comments classified by sentiment, User Journey, User Stories, Competitors, and Questions Analysis. A Data Diagram renders the material as a flow chart. Alongside the canvas sits an AI chat that answers only from the files you supplied, which is rather the point; a Broad Knowledge toggle lets it draw on general knowledge when you want that instead. The chat reads and writes markdown, so it can return an answer as a table.
Underneath, the retrieval layer has been supplied by EasyRAG since December 2025, and the underlying models moved to GPT-5 in August 2025. Results export straight to Notion, or can be shown in a one-click presentation styled in your own brand colours.
It is a focused instrument rather than a general assistant, and it is lightly documented: no API, no mobile application, and a help centre that runs to two articles.
What it does
- Turn uploaded interviews, surveys and documents into a summary, a set of insights and an overall sentiment reading
- Question your own research corpus through an AI chat locked to your sources, or opened up with Broad Knowledge
- Extract detailed personas by dragging the Persona widget onto the canvas
- Map user journeys, jobs-to-be-done and user stories with drag-and-drop widgets
- Classify user comments by sentiment, then drill into the detail behind the overall score
- Transcribe audio and video material, with unlimited hours claimed on paid plans
- Export findings to Notion, or present them in one click in your own brand colours
When to use Research Studio / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Research Studio is the right fit.
When to use Research Studio
- Freelance UX designers and independent researchers who bill by the hour and need interview analysis done in minutes rather than days
- Small product teams and agencies with limited UX and marketing budgets, the audience the two founders explicitly built the tool for
- Product managers who want personas, jobs-to-be-done and user journeys extracted from raw research without running the synthesis themselves
- Marketing and consumer-insight specialists working through survey results and customer feedback alongside qualitative interviews
- Students and lecturers doing qualitative analysis, who qualify for 60% off Premium on proof of status
When not to use Research Studio
- Engineering teams that need an API: none is published, and there is no developer documentation anywhere on the site
- Organisations with strict data-governance requirements: no DPA, no subprocessor list, no declared hosting location and no written GDPR commitment
- Anyone handling interviews under a client confidentiality agreement, given the broad irrevocable content licence the terms grant the publisher
- Users who want a native mobile application: only a browser-based web app is offered
- Buyers expecting enterprise-grade support and documentation from a two-person team with a two-article help centre
How to use Research Studio
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the web app from the site and start a free trial; the site states explicitly that no credit card is required
- Create a project and give it a name you will still recognise once you have several
- Optionally describe the subject, for example 'user interviews regarding an app for providing home health care', which helps the AI situate the material
- Upload your files (CSV, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX, PPTX or PDF), keeping each project to a single topic
- Wait for the analysis, which takes from a few seconds up to around 45 seconds depending on volume
- Read the summary, the insights and the overall sentiment generated straight away
- Drill deeper into sentiment details, persona, competitors and the data diagram
- Drag the widgets you need onto the canvas: Personas, Jobs to be Done, Statements, User Journey, User Stories, Competitors, Questions Analysis
- Question the chat about your corpus, switching on Broad Knowledge if you want answers that go beyond your files
- Export to Notion, or present the results in one click in your brand colours
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No prompt writing: you upload the files and the analysis runs by itself
- Fast, with results in seconds and 45 seconds given as the worst case
- The chat stays locked to your own sources by default, which limits invention
- Low entry price at 12 USD per month on the annual plan, or 15 USD per user per month for a team
- Free trial without a credit card, alongside a persistent free version
- The widgets map onto the deliverables UX researchers actually produce, rather than generic AI output
- Visibly maintained: GPT-5 in August 2025, an EasyRAG retrieval layer in December 2025
Cons
- No mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site, despite a publisher established in the European Union
- No data processing agreement, no subprocessor list and no declared hosting country or region
- The terms grant the publisher a non-exclusive, worldwide and irrevocable licence over uploaded content
- No public API and no developer documentation
- No native mobile application, and a help centre limited to two articles
- Legal pages carry visible errors: an unfilled '[insert customer service email address]' placeholder, and a refund window given as 7 days in the policy but up to 14 on the pricing table
- Terms unchanged since May 2023, and free-tier limits last published in June 2023
Pricing & Plans
Research Studio operates on a freemium basis. A permanent free version exists, referred to twice in the refund policy as 'the limit of the free version', alongside a free trial of 3 days on the individual plan and 7 days for up to five users on Business. The lowest paid entry point is 12.00 USD per month for the Individual (Freelancer) plan taken on an annual commitment; the same plan billed monthly costs 24.00 USD per month. Team pricing starts at 15.00 USD per user per month on the annual commitment, or 30.00 USD per user per month billed monthly.
- up to 3 assets per research
- 100 chat messages in total and 5 MB per uploaded file (limits published in June 2023)
- 12 USD / month
- 'Pay for 9 months
- get 12'
- up to 14 days of refund period
- free 3-day trial
- unlimited transcription hours
- 24 USD / month
- full flexibility
- up to 7 days of refund period
- 15 USD / user / month
- 'Pay for 9 months
- get 12'
- up to 14 days of refund period
- free 7-day trial for up to 5 users
- unlimited transcription hours
- 30 USD / user / month
- 'Pay for 10 months
- get 12'
- up to 14 days of refund period
- unlimited researches
- up to 50 assets per research
- unlimited chat messages
- 25 MB per uploaded file
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Research Studio handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on this site. Neither 'GDPR' nor 'General Data Protection Regulation' appears on any page, in the visible text or in the underlying HTML. No data protection officer is named, no Article 27 representative is designated, and no legal basis is cited article by article. The absence is notable, because Black Device SRL is established in Romania, inside the European Union, so the regulation applies to it whatever the site says. The privacy policy dated 5 February 2024 does grant practical rights: you may access, correct or delete your personal data from your account settings, or by emailing the published contact address. It also states that data may be transferred outside your jurisdiction, backed only by a general undertaking that adequate controls are in place. No standard contractual clauses are named.
Who owns the data?
Under the terms of service dated 23 May 2023, the material you upload remains your Content and must be yours to display. However, by displaying it you grant Black Device SRL a non-exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable licence to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute that content in any and all media. The publisher also reserves the right to remove any of your content at any time, for any reason, and without notice. Intellectual property in Research Studio itself stays with Black Device SRL and its licensors. Personal data can be deleted from your account settings, or by writing to the contact address published on the site.
Reuse rights
The restrictions written into the terms protect the publisher's material, not yours: you must not republish, sell, rent, sub-license, reproduce, duplicate, copy or redistribute material taken from Research Studio itself. No clause restricts what you do with the analyses produced from your own research, so the summaries, insights, personas and journeys you generate can be reused in your own deliverables without asking permission. The exchange runs the other way as well: the licence you grant over uploaded content lets Black Device SRL use, adapt, publish, translate and distribute it, and nothing limits that grant to operating the service. Whether uploaded material is used to train AI models is never addressed.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site does not say where user data is hosted. No country, no region, no cloud provider and no data centre is named anywhere on it, and there is no trust or security page. The privacy policy dated 5 February 2024 states only that information is processed at the company's operating offices and in any other place where the parties involved in processing are located, and that it may therefore be transferred to and held on computers outside your own state, province or country, where data protection law may differ. The undertaking that follows is one of means rather than result: the company will take all steps reasonably necessary, and says no transfer will take place unless adequate controls exist. No transfer mechanism is named. What can be established independently is thin: the publisher, Black Device SRL, is established in Romania, and the domain resolves to an Amazon-operated address flagged as anycast, which says nothing about where customer files actually sit. Retrieval has been delegated to a third party, EasyRAG, whose own hosting is not disclosed. No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification is claimed.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Research Studio.
- The terms grant Black Device SRL a non-exclusive, worldwide and irrevocable licence over everything you upload; think carefully before feeding it interviews covered by a client confidentiality agreement
- The publisher may remove any of your content at any time, for any reason, and without notice
- Nothing on the site says whether your uploaded research is used to train AI models, and no opt-out is documented anywhere
- No hosting location is declared, and the privacy policy explicitly allows your data to be transferred outside your own jurisdiction
- Synthesis this fast quietly discourages reading the source material yourself; an insight you never verified is an insight you cannot defend to a stakeholder
- Automated persona and sentiment extraction flattens the outliers, and the awkward minority view is often the one worth acting on
- After a refund, anything you created beyond the free version's limit is permanently deleted
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. Research Studio runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install, no API key to configure and no connector to set up. The trial starts without a credit card. The published route to a first result is three steps: name a project, upload your files, wait. Widgets are arranged by drag and drop, and the site's own claim is that no prompt has to be written. The only real preparation is gathering files on a single topic in one of the accepted formats. The tool is explicitly designed so that non-experts can use it.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Research Studio
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is Research Studio?
Is there a free trial, and do I need a credit card?
Is there a permanent free plan, or only a trial?
What does Research Studio cost?
Which file formats can I upload?
How long does an analysis take?
Will the AI chat make things up?
Is there an API or a mobile app?
What is the minimum age to use it?
Is there a discount for students or teachers?
Should you pick Research Studio?
Research Studio does one thing, and does it with unusual focus: it takes the raw material of user and customer research and returns the artefacts researchers would otherwise spend days assembling by hand. The absence of prompt engineering is the whole point. You upload, you wait under a minute, and personas, journeys, jobs-to-be-done and sentiment are already waiting. For a freelance designer or a small product team, 12 USD a month on the annual plan buys back a genuinely painful part of the job, and evaluating it costs nothing since the trial asks for no card.
The reservations are not about the product but about the paperwork around it. Black Device SRL is a Romanian company, squarely inside the European Union, yet the word GDPR appears nowhere on its site. There is no data processing agreement, no subprocessor list, no stated hosting location, and no answer to whether uploaded material feeds model training. The terms of service, unchanged since May 2023, grant the publisher a non-exclusive, worldwide and irrevocable licence over everything you upload, a clause worth reading twice before handing it confidential interviews. The refund policy still shows an unfilled placeholder where a support address belongs, and contradicts the pricing table on the length of the refund window.
None of that makes the tool untrustworthy. It makes it young and lightly documented, which is what a two-person team with no known funding tends to look like. Judge it on that basis: excellent value for research that is not commercially sensitive, and a harder call for anything covered by a client confidentiality agreement. Try it on a non-sensitive project first, because the evaluation is free and the answer will be obvious within an afternoon.
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