About Participation Studio
Research led by people who have done this at scale
Participation Studio is a specialist research practice. We were founded by two senior practitioners whose combined experience spans healthcare, regulated industries, NHS, medical devices, retail transformation, and complex digital products. Every project is led by someone with the depth of experience to ask the right questions, design the right study, and tell you clearly what the findings mean.
35+ years combined
Senior UX, CX, and research experience spanning NHS, medical devices, financial services, retail, and digital products.
Independently certified practice
Matthew holds the Nielsen Norman Group UX Management certification, and Rosalyn is a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner. Independent, rigorous, and recognised internationally.
Trusted NIHR partner
Participation Studio is the designated PPIE delivery partner to the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Accelerated Surgical Care.
The founders
Participation Studio was founded by Matthew Hodgkinson and Rosalyn Potts, two practitioners who met through the research and design community and saw the same gap: organisations needed rigorous, ethical, inclusive research delivered by people with real senior experience, not account managers farming work out to junior teams.
Matthew Hodgkinson
Co-founder and Director · LinkedIn
Matthew is a UX and research leader with nearly two decades of experience in some of the UK and Europe's most demanding research environments. As Global UX Manager at Johnson & Johnson MedTech, he led UX across Class III medical devices, robotic-assisted surgery systems, and AI-enabled clinical decision tools, partnering with clinical, regulatory, and data science teams across EMEA and North America.
Before that, he built and led the UX function at Covéa Insurance from scratch, and delivered service redesigns at Sky that produced £1.5M in annual cost savings. His early career spans Walmart Global eCommerce, Capita, and high-volume digital platforms.
Matthew holds a BSc (Hons) in Cybernetics and Virtual Worlds (HCI) from the University of Bradford and is Nielsen Norman Group certified with a specialism in UX Management. He is a speaker at NIHR and Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber, and a mentor on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme.
- Global UX Manager, Johnson & Johnson MedTech
- Head of UX, Covéa Insurance
- NIHR & Health Innovation speaker; NHS Clinical Entrepreneur mentor
- BSc (Hons) HCI; NNG UX Management certified
Rosalyn Potts
Co-founder · LinkedIn
Rosalyn is a customer experience and qualitative research leader with over 15 years of experience building and leading high-performing research and CX teams. She led the customer experience function through Europe's largest retail transformation at ASDA, building a cross-functional insight loop that connected user research, analytics, and contact centre data to inform decisions at board level.
Prior to that she built and led a 12-person UX and research team at ASDA George, establishing the research culture, practice, and design system that underpinned one of the UK's largest fashion ecommerce platforms. Rosalyn has a particular strength in translating complex qualitative insight into strategic decisions that executives can act on.
She holds a First Class BA from Northumbria University and is a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner.
- Head of CX Change, ASDA (Europe's largest retail transformation)
- Head of UX, ASDA George
- First Class BA; Prosci Certified Change Practitioner
- Prosci Certified Change Practitioner
A specialist practice, not a generalist agency
Every project is led personally by Matthew or Rosalyn, from the first conversation through to the final readout. There is no account manager layer and no junior researcher quietly running things in the background while a senior name sits on the proposal.
For larger studies, multi-site fieldwork, or specialist methods outside our day-to-day, we scale through a vetted bench of senior researchers, facilitators, and analysts we have worked with for years. They are brought in for their specific expertise, not to cover a gap, and they work under the same senior leadership as the rest of your project.
This means you always know who is leading your research, what their credentials are, and why they were chosen for your project. The people who design your study, recruit your participants, and interpret your findings are the same people who built their careers doing this kind of work.
Our sectors of deepest expertise are health and social care, NHS, regulated industries, and digital products. We also bring significant experience across financial services, retail, and public sector, where trust, inclusion, and adoption are critical to getting research right.
Talk to us about your projectFrom insight to action
Participation Studio finds out what is true: how people behave, what they need, and where a product or service is falling short. The research gives you the evidence. What comes next is usually the harder question.
Clients often ask us what to do with the findings once the report lands. When a project calls for it, we bring in Dual Perspective, our sister consultancy, to turn the insight into a clear product roadmap, practical customer experience design, and the delivery leadership to get it shipped.
Participation Studio stays the lead relationship throughout. Dual Perspective is the extra bench strength for what happens after the research, not a separate handover.
See how Dual Perspective helpsWe fully recognise the effort your team invested in recruitment, moderation, and analysis, and we genuinely appreciate the quality of the discussions and reporting.
- Usability problems in an insulin device surfaced before manufacturing locked anything in, with human factors evidence supporting the regulatory submission.
- An NHS patient portal team got a prioritised, evidenced list of adoption barriers, and the highest-leverage fix wasn't the one they expected.
- Patient involvement changed a trial's primary endpoint before the protocol was finalised, cited by the ethics committee as a model for evidencing PPIE.
Trusted PPI and PPIE delivery partner to the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Accelerated Surgical Care.
Work with people who have done this before
Tell us about your research needs and we will come back with a clear proposal, usually within one working day.
Get a quoteWe usually respond within one working day.
Prefer to talk it through first?
Book a free 20-minute call. No obligation, no sales pitch. We'll tell you honestly whether research is worth it for your decision, and what it would cost.