Congratulations to KQED!
UserTesting named KQED the winner of the 2026 Illumi Award for Mission Impact for its mobile app. While that award belongs to KQED's product, research, and community teams, Uptech Studio is proud to have been their mobile development partner since 2021, rebuilding the iOS and Android apps from the ground up and helping ship what research kept teaching us.
The trophy is nice. The story behind it is better.
Before the rebuild, KQED's public media app was stuck with a rating under 3 stars. Repeat usage sat around 35%. Listeners often used other apps for live radio, which meant KQED lost the chance to turn a stream into a deeper relationship with news, podcasts, and local programming.
A common instinct in that situation is to add more content, more shelves, more ways to browse a catalog. Research with real Bay Area community members pointed somewhere else.
People weren't looking for a content library. They wanted a daily local companion.
That single reframing changed navigation, language, structure, and emotional tone. It also changed how we prioritized engineering work. Discovery, live radio, and habits that bring people back each day beat polished archive UX every time. Product strategy, design, and development had to move together around that insight, not treat research as a pre-kickoff checkbox.
KQED used continuous research with community members at every stage, from early concepts through post-launch. What people said after shipping matters as much as what they said before. Ratings, installs, and listening behavior told the same story the interviews did: when the app feels like a companion for local life, people stick around.
After launch:
Those numbers are outcomes of listening, then building. Flutter gave us one codebase for iOS and Android so we could iterate quickly; research told us what to iterate toward. You need both. Speed without direction just ships the wrong library faster.
Mission-driven products fail in public when the experience undermines trust. A three-star app doesn't just drag App Store metrics. It chips at the relationship a nonprofit has with the people it exists to serve.
The reverse is also true. When research keeps the community at the center, software can help fulfill the reason the organization exists. That is what UserTesting's Mission Impact award celebrates, and why this win matters beyond a press release.
If you're building something for a real audience (not a slide deck), start with who it's for and keep asking them after you ship. Then give product, design, and engineering a shared mandate to act on what you hear.
We're honored to collaborate with KQED on that work. Looking for help building something that listens as well as it ships? Let's talk.
More on Uptech Studio's partnership with KQED:
