Research Knowledge Platform

User research is only useful if people can find it again. As teams and libraries grow, evidence ends up in slide decks, interview notes and someone’s head. Gleanly needed a knowledge platform that could hold all of that in one place.

The audience is product people with high expectations. They do not want a dumping ground. They want evidence connected to insights, insights connected to recommendations, and a way to see whether a finding is still current when colleagues are working remotely.

Research also does not start inside a single app. People discover quotes, tests and observations while they are already in a browser, in a prototype, or in another tool. Gleanly had to accept evidence from the wider web, not only from forms it owned.

Building that from zero meant inventing both the product and the habit. The platform had to be robust enough for large brands and still feel fast enough for a researcher who wants to capture something before the thought disappears.

We built Gleanly as a research knowledge platform from the ground up, using a Laravel backend and a React frontend. From kick-off to a fully functional beta took just over a year. Within nine more months the business became profitable.

The product is organised around Atomic UX Research: evidence, insights and recommendations sitting together so a team can see not just what they think, but why they think it. Notifications keep remote collaborators on the latest version of the work.

APIs were part of the design, not an afterthought. That let us add other applications quickly, including a browser tool so people can capture data from anywhere on the internet and drop it straight into the repository.

Gleanly now serves product teams at some of the world’s biggest brands. It works because it treats research as a living system: capture, synthesise, share, and keep it up to date, rather than as a folder that nobody opens after the playback.