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Popsicle Labs

Our work

We work toward outcomes.

Every engagement starts from what your team needs to get to. Underneath each one is a menu of things we do, and you can take one piece or several.

So you can

See what's really happening

Evidence from the people a decision affects, not what got passed along.

  • Hard-to-reach recruitment

    We find and screen the people most panels can't deliver, and we do it by hand.

  • Interviews, diaries and usability testing

    One-to-one and task-based, not focus groups. Run by the people who designed the study.

  • A research layer on your own data

    Calls, chats, docs, hallway memory. We pull it into one place you can search, keep what customers actually said apart from what got passed along, and flag what you still don't know.

  • Findings you can forward

    A readout deck, a white paper, a webinar, or a research repo your team can still search in six months. Every finding traces back to the question that produced it.

So you can

Make the call with confidence

Know where the market is, where you stand, and which direction you can defend.

  • Stakeholder alignment

    We gather the competing internal positions instead of picking a side, then run the working session that turns them into a shared set of questions and tradeoffs.

  • Program and market landscapes

    What everyone else is actually doing, documented and sourced, so a design decision starts from evidence instead of anecdote.

  • Competitive and adoption research

    Where a market is heading, who is already there, and which opening is defensible.

  • Product strategy and decision support

    Turn market evidence, customer insight, stakeholder input, and competing constraints into a clearer direction the team can defend.

So you can

Get people to act

When a good offer isn't landing, find where the journey breaks and redesign around how people decide.

  • Journey and friction mapping

    A shared view of what customers are experiencing, where the friction lives, and which moments actually move behavior.

  • Behavioral program and communications design

    Understand why a good offer is not landing, then reshape the message, program, or experience around how people actually decide and act.

  • Message testing

    We A/B test messages and offers with real customers, before launch or live in market. One redesign drove 50.2% more clicks into enrollment across 331,000 customers.

So you can

Align before you invest

Something real enough to react to, before the engineering spend.

  • Working prototypes, fast

    Something concrete in weeks, not quarters — real enough to test with customers and to argue with internally.

  • Concept and prototype testing

    We put the concept in front of real customers before the build, and watch what they do, not just what they say.

  • Product and UX design

    Flows, screens, and design-system work your engineers can build from, with accessibility built in rather than bolted on.

  • Executive and conference demos

    A narrative and a working experience that makes a complex product direction credible enough to show.

So you can

Build your team's capability

Smaller teams, new tools. We add capacity now and build skills that stay after we leave.

  • Fractional research and design leadership

    Research and design teams are getting smaller and closer to product. We lead, mentor, and leave the practice behind — not just the deliverable.

  • AI adoption and working practices

    Teams are too busy to work out the tooling. We show the use cases, build the workflows, and make them work inside your guardrails.

What that looked like

What the work can look like.

Different problems call for different artifacts. The point is the same: give the team something concrete enough to understand, test, align around, and use.

  • Alignment before investment

    Competing product directions became one clickable prototype and a demo narrative the team could react to, refine, and put in front of leadership — before the engineering spend.

  • Two Popsicle characters at a wall-sized journey map of pinned emails, letters, and customer quotes, with three key moments circled and an engagement chart below.

    The messages that moved people

    We audited every message a utility sends, matched open and click data against real customer conversations, and mapped where the journey actually breaks — then redesigned around how people decide, not how the program is structured.

  • A mint-green Popsicle character wearing a headset sits on a stool in a grid control room, talking with an orange Popsicle character who takes notes on a clipboard, in front of wall screens showing power-grid maps.

    Voices a panel can't deliver

    We source niche populations by hand — from grid control-room operators to income-qualified households in arrears. The people a decision affects most are usually the ones a panel will never reach.

Publications

Published Research

Studies, papers, and conference presentations – all free to use.

2026

2025

2024

2023

Reach out

What complexity are you facing?

We read everything that comes in and reply within two business days.

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