Tl;dr
Try Manus AI for deep UX research, Granola to transcribe + aggregate user interviews, Banani to make UX testing prototypes faster (or without a designer), and let RallyUX self-organise your UX research repository. Let’s dive deeper into why I picked each AI UX product and how it can save you weeks of work.
Manus: Deep UX research
Sometimes, before jumping to users to validate something, you need to dig into user patterns, market trends, and so on.
Manus is your AI research assistant that can collect and structure information on any topic you need. Let's say your product is expanding into a new market and you need to gain a better understanding of the local market. You can ask Manus to research that for you.
On paper, it sounds similar to ChatGPT, but the power lies in its ability to browse and find more data than GPT.
Pros
Simple and familiar chat interface
Best-in-class AI research capabilities
Makes a neat PDF to share for each query
Cons
Only one concurrent chat in the free plan
Granola: User Interviews
Best tool for transcribing and organising user interviews. It’s not joining the call as a bot and works in the background.
Additionally, you can add your own notes that, alongside the transcript, will be aggregated together. Good if you’re conducting user interviews, too lazy to set up more complicated AI tools.
Pros
Market-leading UX for transcribing
Follow up with the composer to ask additional questions
Ability to use it as a UX research repository
Cons
You need to do all the consent and NDA signing on your end
Limited number of supported languages
Banani: Quick AI Prototyping
Tell me, how often do you have some insight, hypothesis, or idea that you want to user test, but you lack time to prototype it, or your designer is busy with other tasks? I bet it happens quite often.
Banani solves this by providing a simple AI-first design editor that allows you to generate designs and prototypes of new features without waiting. You can upload existing screens as screenshots and ask it to add or change something.
Pros
Extremely fast for prototyping
Removes reliance on designers
Generous free plan
Cons
Require some learning on how to prompt on your end
Notably: AI Insights Synthesis
Notably uses AI to help you make sense of messy qualitative data. Upload interviews or transcripts, and it will summarize them into key insights and themes.
Instead of staring at pages of notes, it highlights important moments, auto-tags them, and even clusters them into patterns on a whiteboard-like canvas.
Pros
Flexible templates, great repository
No need for an extensive setup
Strong for qualitative research
Cons
UI is a bit chaotic and overwhelming
Works less well for quantitative data
Maze: AI User Testing
Maze started as a usability testing platform and has recently been expanded to include a multitude of AI automations within its platform. You can run unmoderated and moderated AI tests, then ask the AI to summarize results, find recurring friction points, and even suggest improvements.
If you want quick validation of a prototype before pushing it to development, Maze AI can literally save you days.
Pros
Great for uncontrolled and controlled AI UX testing
Amazing set of AI features to aggregate and analyse results
Easy for non-researchers
Cons
Requires some additional setup on your end
Criteria for choosing tools
I’ve been doing UX research as a part of my product design role for the last 10 years. Without exaggeration, over those years, I've conducted thousands of interviews. The main criteria for me to make a short list were:
No reliance on stakeholders to start using the tool
How much time can a tool save compared to manual work
Ease of use and setup
Final thoughts
UX research is still human work. AI can't replace empathy or knowing what question to ask. But it can absolutely save you from hours of tagging, transcription, and organizing.
Tools like Granola, Manus, Banani, and others mentioned give you more time to actually THINK about what users are saying instead of drowning in manual work.
You can see more examples of how new AI products accelerate product teams in my review of the best AI tools for PMs.
