From blank slate to breakthroughs.
Whether you’re in UX, an entrepreneur, or a product manager — having a tool that accelerates your research discovery process is vital.
Enter Perplexity, a powerful AI tool designed to help you navigate through the initial stages of research with speed and clarity. As a pro user, Perplexity offers a unique set of capabilities that sets it apart from other research tools, making it indispensable for anyone conducting market research, exploring new concepts, or simply needing a strong starting point.
AI-Assisted Discovery: Getting Started with Confidence
One of Perplexity’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to help researchers get started. Often, the hardest part of research is breaking through the inertia that comes with facing an empty screen or a vague research question. With Perplexity, you can quickly gather preliminary information on any topic, allowing you to generate a baseline of knowledge that can be built upon. This is particularly useful when you’re exploring a new market or investigating customer needs.
In those early stages, AI can be invaluable for uncovering key insights and trends, even when you’re not sure where to begin. Perplexity’s ability to synthesize a wide range of information and present it in a cohesive manner accelerates this process, helping you formulate questions, identify gaps, and set a clear direction for further exploration.
Perplexity home page, the user has the ability to type in any question as well as narrow their focus
Discovery in Research: Setting the Foundation
The discovery stage is perhaps the most critical part of any research process. Whether you’re conducting user research, exploring market opportunities, or developing a new product, the ability to understand the current state of the problem is essential for shaping your strategy moving forward. Perplexity is an ideal tool for this phase because it provides a broad yet focused overview of the current landscape, giving you an immediate sense of the issues, trends, and patterns within your area of interest.
In the UX research framework from Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), the discovery stage is where researchers aim to gather as much context as possible. This involves understanding users, their pain points, and the broader environment in which the product or service operates. NNG emphasizes the importance of qualitative research at this stage — interviews, observations, and contextual inquiries — while also noting that combining qualitative insights with quantitative data can be powerful. With Perplexity, you can start this discovery journey by quickly collecting high-level qualitative insights and verifying them with data-backed sources. This helps you construct a narrative that will guide the rest of your research.
Perplexity allows you to take on this discovery work with ease by presenting an organized overview of relevant data and sources, eliminating the daunting task of sifting through countless articles, reports, and posts manually. It shines when it comes to uncovering user behaviors, competitor activities, and market trends — especially useful when you’re still in the process of defining the exact scope of your problem.
Example of a more complete prompt to kick off discovery researchOutput from the prompt in the previous image
Product Discovery and the Product Operating Model
In the context of product discovery, Perplexity proves itself even more valuable. The product operating model, as described in modern product development methodologies, revolves around constant discovery and iteration. Rather than merely reacting to stakeholder requests, product teams must engage in continuous discovery to uncover the root of user problems and validate their assumptions before moving into the solution space.
This model is essential for creating products that are both valuable to users and aligned with business goals. Discovery isn’t just about having ideas — it’s about understanding the current market conditions, customer needs, and competitive landscape. Here, Perplexity steps in by providing quick access to an array of market research, customer reviews, and competitor insights, giving product managers a real-time snapshot of the current state. This overview allows teams to focus on solving the right problems and to avoid the trap of building features or products without a solid foundation.
Product discovery is built on continuous exploration, and with tools like Perplexity, teams can avoid wasting time on unvalidated assumptions.
Perplexity helps product teams kick off discovery
Empathize: Understanding Users Deeply
Perplexity also plays a key role in the empathize stage of the design thinking framework. This phase is all about deeply understanding the users and their problems before moving on to ideation or prototyping. In this stage, researchers and designers immerse themselves in the user’s world through interviews, shadowing, or observing behavior. While the empathize stage requires human-centered methods, tools like Perplexity can help speed up the process by providing contextual background information that enriches your understanding.
Before stepping into interviews or observational research, you can use Perplexity to gather broader context on the user’s environment, societal trends, or potential challenges. This background knowledge allows researchers to form better questions and identify areas that need further investigation. In short, Perplexity helps accelerate the early stages of empathy-building by presenting key insights about users, industries, and environments in a digestible format.
The researcher is trying to understand the key personas and pain points of users of EHRs in hospitals
A Comprehensive Overview of the Current State
No matter the context — whether it’s UX research, product discovery, or empathizing with users — understanding the current state of the problem is essential. Perplexity excels at helping researchers gather an overview of this current state quickly and effectively. The AI provides immediate access to trends, challenges, and key data points, all while offering source transparency. This enables you to gain a clear picture of the situation and make informed decisions about where to focus your next steps. When it comes to next steps Perplexity assists the user there too. It has a Related section that offers up additional areas to explore. This helps a user to continue down the discovery rabbit hole without having to spend too much time trying to figure out where to go next.
The researcher doesn’t even need to come up with additional prompts to learn more about a topic
The discovery stage sets the tone for everything that follows in the research or product development process. With Perplexity, you can enter this stage confidently, knowing that you’ll have a clear, comprehensive view of the landscape before diving deeper.
Market Research Made Simple: Streaming Platforms Example
When it comes to market research, Perplexity truly shines. The tool excels in gathering and analyzing large amounts of information from diverse sources — whether you’re comparing competitors, identifying customer trends, or assessing market needs. Perplexity simplifies the often overwhelming process of market research by pulling together relevant data, presenting it with transparency, and offering a cohesive understanding of the landscape. To illustrate this, let’s walk through how you might use Perplexity to conduct market research on the streaming platforms industry.
Step 1: Define Your Research Focus
The first step in conducting market research is to define your research focus or key questions. Let’s say you want to investigate the competitive landscape of streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and others. Your goal might be to understand market share, growth trends, user demographics, and new opportunities for entering the market.
With Perplexity, you can start by inputting a broad search query like “streaming platforms market research 2024,” allowing the AI to provide you with a wide view of the current industry state. This serves as your baseline, giving you an immediate sense of where the major players stand, what emerging trends are shaping the market, and which platforms are gaining or losing ground.
The original prompt for this example was “Streaming platforms market research 2024”
Step 2: Analyze Market Size and Growth Trends
Once Perplexity presents the initial data, you can begin diving deeper into key metrics such as market size and growth trends. For instance, Perplexity might surface reports detailing the global market value of streaming platforms, projected growth rates for the next five years, and regional performance breakdowns. You may find that streaming platforms are expected to grow by 10% annually, with significant expansion in international markets like India and Latin America.
You can then refine your search to dig deeper into specific areas of interest, such as “streaming platforms growth trends in India” or “Disney+ market share in 2024.” Perplexity will display up-to-date statistics along with source citations, allowing you to confirm the accuracy of this data. The transparency of these citations ensures that you are pulling from reliable sources, such as industry reports, news articles, or proprietary market studies, which is crucial when assessing market opportunities.
The next prompt was “Disney+ market share information for 2024”
Step 3: Competitive Analysis
Next, you can use Perplexity to conduct a competitive analysis of major players like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video. With queries like “Netflix vs. Disney+ 2024 comparison” or “streaming platform user engagement 2023,” Perplexity will compile relevant data on platform performance, user retention rates, and pricing strategies.
For example, you may learn that Netflix has higher user retention rates due to its original content strategy, while Disney+ has seen rapid subscriber growth driven by its existing franchises. You could also explore pricing models — whether Netflix’s tiered pricing or Hulu’s ad-supported options are gaining more traction. Perplexity will summarize the key points from each source and provide direct links to the original articles or reports, ensuring you can dive deeper when needed.
This analysis will allow you to evaluate how these platforms differentiate themselves, which will help you identify potential gaps or opportunities in the market that your business could exploit.
The competitive analysis prompt was “Disney+ vs Netflix feature comparison 2024”
Step 4: Customer Demographics and Behavior
Understanding the demographics and behavior of users on streaming platforms is critical when entering or expanding in the market. You can use Perplexity to explore customer preferences, such as “streaming platform user demographics 2024” or “what users prefer on Netflix vs. Hulu.”
For example, Perplexity might highlight that Netflix appeals to a broad demographic with a mix of genres, while Hulu skews toward younger, ad-tolerant users interested in real-time TV streaming. It could also reveal emerging user behaviors, such as binge-watching patterns or preferences for localized content, which can shape your strategy if you’re planning to launch a new platform or adjust your existing offering.
Perplexity’s ability to synthesize behavioral data allows you to quickly assess key demographic segments, from age groups to geographic regions, helping you to tailor your product or marketing strategies accordingly.
The next prompt focused on preferences, “User preferences between Netflix and Hulu”
Step 5: Identifying Growth Opportunities and Market Gaps
After gathering data on market size, growth trends, competition, and user behavior, Perplexity can help you identify growth opportunities and market gaps. For instance, you may find that while the U.S. market is saturated, there’s explosive growth potential in regions like Southeast Asia, where mobile streaming is on the rise.
You might also uncover underserved niches, such as content targeting specific age groups or language preferences. For instance, Perplexity might show that non-English content consumption is growing significantly in markets like India or Latin America, indicating an opportunity for localized programming or partnerships with regional content creators.
By refining your searches, such as “streaming platform opportunities in Southeast Asia” or “non-English content growth 2024,” you’ll gain a clear understanding of where future investments could yield the highest returns. The AI helps you filter through the noise and distill complex datasets into actionable insights, all while giving you the confidence that the information is credible and timely.
We then focused on opportunities for growth and used the prompt, “Streaming platform opportunities in Southeast Asia”
Step 6: Validate, Cross-Check, and Organize Your Findings
One of Perplexity’s standout features is its ability to provide detailed citations for every piece of data it presents. This transparency is invaluable when validating your findings. For example, if Perplexity identifies a growth trend or new market opportunity, you can easily trace the source of that information and cross-check it with other reports to ensure accuracy. This ensures that your conclusions are well-supported by credible and reliable data.
Beyond validation, Perplexity’s convert-to-page functionality allows you to organize your research effortlessly. Once you’ve gathered enough data, you can convert your findings into a shareable page that compiles all relevant insights, sources, and citations in one place. This feature simplifies the process of creating cohesive reports for stakeholders or investors, eliminating the need for manual formatting and consolidation.
Whether you’re building a business case, developing a product strategy, or pitching to potential partners, the convert-to-page functionality allows you to present your findings in a professional and structured format. With everything neatly organized and backed by transparent sources, you can deliver insights with confidence, knowing that every claim is verifiable and supported by a clear trail of data.
We completed our market research by converting all of the output to a page that we can share
By leveraging Perplexity, the process of conducting comprehensive market research becomes streamlined and efficient. Whether you’re comparing streaming platforms, diving into growth trends, or analyzing customer behavior, Perplexity offers a powerful, transparent, and accurate tool for synthesizing vast amounts of information.
A Must-Have Tool for Every Researcher
Perplexity offers a robust set of tools designed to streamline your research process. From quickly gathering preliminary insights to compiling in-depth market analysis, Perplexity accelerates every stage of discovery. Its ability to provide transparent citations, combined with the flexibility to choose different LLMs, gives pro users unparalleled control over the depth and accuracy of their research.
In today’s fast-paced world, where the speed and quality of insights can determine the success of your project, Perplexity is more than just a helpful tool — it’s a research companion that enhances productivity and boosts confidence in decision-making. No matter the challenge, Perplexity is the essential tool that belongs in every researcher’s toolkit.
The power of Perplexity in research was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
