We’re for the brave.

Better experiences happen when the people who make them have the courage to learn from the people who use them.

We partner with enterprise research, design and product leaders across the globe who bravely put their products, ideas and beliefs to the test with their users.

These are people who are willing to be wrong, to be curious, to iterate, because they know that what they stand to gain is worth more than holding tightly onto their assumptions.

It may sound counter-intuitive but being willing to be wrong is precisely what helps them to be right. It’s this practice that transforms good products and companies into great ones.

We're on a mission to shape better user experiences through practical, accurate, and impartial insights, conveyed holistically to give enterprise teams the clarity and confidence to act collaboratively.

Guiding principles

Our principles make today’s choices and tomorrow’s challenges easier.

Have courage

We’re the kid at the front of the class with their hand up. We aim high and we’re not afraid of feedback or respectfully asking hard questions.

Inspire change

We bring people together and help them to see what matters. We create positive momentum through moments and insights that inspire.

Work together

We have opinions and we hold them loosely. Creating great user experiences is a team effort that requires many different perspectives.

Create value

We build trust with the people we work with by designing our engagements to create value for them. We are believers in the long game.

Be open and curious

We seek to understand why people do what they do and think what they think. By going beyond the surface we make our work impactful.

As a freshly formed product team with big goals, The Space InBetween’s approach and facilities brought us together and created the shared understanding we needed. Adaptable, meticulous and able to engage with us at all levels, the experience and resulting insights have had a meaningful influence on our product priorities and strategy. We'd barely finished the first study and people were asking me, ‘When is the next one?’.

Hadley Bellam

Head of Design & ResearchEasy Crypto

From making to shaping experiences

After a decade of designing and building digital experiences, an uncomfortable but important question came up. Were we really living up to our original purpose, to help organisations to create better experiences for people through technology?

The short answer was ‘not really’. When we looked dispassionately at our practice, more often than not we were more user-scented than user-centred. That’s not to say we weren’t good at what we did, we definitely were, it’s just that users weren't always a tangible part of the process.

This didn’t sit well with us, so we compared notes with our peers and some of our closest clients, and discovered that this problem wasn’t ours alone - it was widespread. Many organisations waxed-lyrical about the value of user-centred design, but struggled with the user-centred part.

Curious as to why, we interviewed over a dozen senior design leaders and discovered many reasons. The ones that stood out the most were that some teams lacked specialist capability, others were simply stretched too thin, and almost all had no dedicated research facilities.

After careful consideration, we decided to redesign our business, moving away from creating user experiences ourselves, to focus solely on helping brave teams to discover clear and impartial insights and then to act on them collaboratively and with confidence.

To help make this happen, we also built New Zealand’s first world-class human-centred research and innovation lab. A place for easily, effectively and collaboratively shaping the strategy and de-risking the design of exceptional products and services.

Brendan Jarvis

Managing Founder & UX Researcher

Brendan is the insatiably curious Managing Founder of The Space InBetween; a New Zealand based, globally focused enterprise UX research consultancy .

His mission is to help enterprise leaders improve user experience through practical, impartial, and accurate behaviour-based insights.

Brendan facilitates research in a way that deepens cross-functional collaboration and enables teams to be confident in the decisions that they're making.

He also hosts the Brave UX podcast, featuring in-depth interviews with over 100 leading voices in user research, design, and product management. Listened to in over 50 countries, the show has been described as “courageously insightful“, “thought-provoking“ and with “lots of actionable takeaways“.

Follow Brendan on LinkedIn and on X.

Be brave

with us