Maze 101: Complete Guide to Maze

Welcome to Maze!

If you’re here, you’re probably trying to solve a familiar problem: getting reliable user insights without slowing your team down. Maybe your research process feels too manual, too scattered, or too hard to scale. Maybe you need a faster way to test ideas, validate decisions, and share findings people will actually act on.

Maze gives teams a faster, scalable way to run research, learn from users, and bring insights into product decisions. Whether you’re testing prototypes, collecting feedback, or building a repeatable research workflow across your team, Maze is the user research solution you need.

We’ve designed this guide to help you get up and running fast, whether you’re new to Maze or looking to sharpen your skills. You can use the table of contents to jump to a specific topic or read through the chapters to learn the platform step by step. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of what Maze can do, how to use its core features, and how to run better research with speed and a lot more clarity.

In this chapter, we'll cover:

Maze is an AI-first end-to-end user research platform that helps Research, Product, and Marketing teams learn from real users to make confident decisions about what to build, launch, and optimize. With Maze, teams can recruit the right participants, run high-quality research and user testing, and turn customer feedback into clear, decision-ready insights across the product lifecycle—from early product discovery to post-launch validation and optimization.

Maze is a comprehensive user research platform that provides a suite of research methods for running in-depth studies, so you can keep a continuous system of learning running alongside product development.

Whether you’re running qualitative interviews or quantitative usability studies, Maze supports every step of the UX research process—including recruiting participants, running studies, analyzing results, and sharing valuable insights with stakeholders.

With Maze AI, you can plan and automate studies, generate and refine questions, run AI‑moderated interviews, and quickly summarize findings and key themes. With Maze panel, you can recruit new participants, manage and reuse your own audiences over time, and keep feedback flowing from the right people at every stage.

Automated reports bring your quantitative and qualitative data together—success rates, paths, misclicks, heatmaps, usability scores, and themes—so you can share decision‑ready insights.

Here’s more of what you can do with Maze:

Maze is designed to be intuitive and collaborative, so researchers and non-researchers alike can participate. Use this guide as a practical reference to help you get the most value from Maze and turn research data into insights faster.

When you log into Maze, you land on your home workspace. This is your starting point and central hub for running and managing all types of research. You can find quick access to recent studies, templates, and key resources to help you get started or pick up where you left off.

From here, you can create a new study from scratch or using pre-built templates, revisit drafts or live research studies, and see what your team is actively working on.

The left navigation panel is your command center. It gives you access to everything you need to run end-to-end research.

Here's what you'll find:

Together, these areas support the full research workflow, from setting up studies to analyzing results and collaborating with your team.

In Maze, a study is a structured research experience you create for participants. It’s where you define your research goal, design the tasks or questions participants will complete, and choose how you’ll collect feedback. Maze gives you three different ways to run research, each supporting different ways of learning from users, depending on the depth, speed, and level of interaction you need.

Unmoderated studies let you collect structured feedback asynchronously, without a live researcher present. You design the study once, share it with participants, and Maze captures responses, recordings, and UX metrics automatically.

Unmoderated studies include prototype testing on Figma designs, usability tests, surveys, and live website or mobile app testing. They’re ideal for fast, repeatable research at scale.

AI-moderated studies enable voice-led, conversational research without requiring a live facilitator. Maze’s AI moderator guides participants through questions, asks relevant follow-up questions, and captures rich qualitative feedback. This study type is well-suited for scaling interviews while maintaining depth and consistency.

Moderated studies are live sessions led by a researcher. They allow for real-time interaction, probing, and adaptation based on participant responses. Moderated interviews are best for exploratory research in design processes, complex topics, or situations where deeper discussion and clarification are needed.

Next, we will walk through a simple setup to connect Maze to your product and tools, including your website and the channels where your team already collaborates. This ensures everything is in place before you run your first study, whether you are new to research or an experienced researcher who is just new to Maze.