A Breakthrough Year for Optimal: Reflecting on 2025

As we close out 2025, we’ve been reflecting on what we’ve achieved together and where we’re headed next. 

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We’re proud to have supported customers in 45+ countries and nearly 400 cities, powering insights for teams at LEGO, Google, Apple, Nike, and many more. Over the last 12 months alone, more than 1.2 million participants completed studies on Optimal, shaping decisions that lead to better, more intuitive products and experiences around the world.

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We also strengthened and brought our community together. We attended 10 industry events, launched 4 leadership circle breakfasts for senior leaders in UX, product and design, and hosted 19 webinars, creating spaces to exchange ideas, share best practices, and explore the future of our changing landscape across topics like AI, automation, and accessibility.

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But the real story isn't in the numbers. It's in what we built to meet this moment.

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Entering a New Era for Insights

This year, we introduced a completely refreshed Optimal experience - a new Home and Studies interface designed to remove friction and help teams move faster. Clean, calm, intentional. Built not just to look modern, but to feel effortless.

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Optimal: From Discovery to Delivery

2025 was a milestone year: it marked the most significant expansion of the Optimal platform we think we’ve ever accomplished, with an introduction of automation powered by AI.

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Interviews

A transformative way to accelerate insights from interviews and videos through automated highlight reels, instant transcripts, summaries, and AI chat, eliminating days and weeks of manual work.

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Prototype Testing

Test designs early and often. Capture the nuance of user interactions with screen, audio, and/or video recording.

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Live Site Testing

Watch real people interact with any website and web app to see what’s actually happening. Your direct window into reality.

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We also continued enhancing our core toolkit, adding display logic to surveys and launching a new study creation flow to help teams move quickly and confidently across the platform.

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AI: Automate the Busywork, Focus on the Breakthroughs

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The next era of research isn't about replacing humans with AI. It’s about making room for the work humans do best. In 2025, we were intentional with where we added AI to Optimal, guided by our core principle to automate your research. Our ever-growing AI toolkit helps you:

• accelerate your analysis and uncover key insights with automated insights
• transcribe interviews 
• refine study questions for clarity
• dig deeper with AI chat 
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AI handles the tedious parts so you can focus on the meaningful ones.

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Looking Ahead: Raising the Bar for UX Research & Insights

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2025 built out our foundation. The next will raise the bar.

We're entering a phase where research and insights becomes:
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• faster to run
• easier to communicate
• available to everyone on your team
• and infinitely more powerful with AI woven throughout your workflow

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To everyone who ran a study, shared feedback, or pushed us to do better: thank you. You make Optimal what it is. Here’s to an even faster, clearer, more impactful year of insights.


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Onwards and upwards.

At Optimal, we know the reality of user research: you've just wrapped up a fantastic interview session, your head is buzzing with insights, and then... you're staring at hours of video footage that somehow needs to become actionable recommendations for your team.

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User interviews and usability sessions are treasure troves of insight, but the reality is reviewing hours of raw footage can be time-consuming, tedious, and easy to overlook important details. Too often, valuable user stories never make it past the recording stage.

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That's why we’re excited to announce the launch of Interviews, a brand-new tool that saves you time with AI and automation, turns real user moments into actionable recommendations, and provides the evidence you need to shape decisions, bring stakeholders on board, and inspire action.

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Interviews, Reimagined

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We surveyed more than 100 researchers, designers, and product managers, conducted discovery interviews, tested prototypes, and ran feedback sessions to help guide the discovery and development of Optimal Interviews.

The result? What once took hours of video review now takes minutes. With Interviews, you get:

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• Instant clarity: Upload your interviews and let AI automatically surface key themes, pain points, opportunities, and other key insights.
  
• Deeper exploration: Ask follow-up questions and anything with AI chat. Every insight comes with supporting video evidence, so you can back up recommendations with real user feedback.
  
• Automatic highlight reels: Generate clips and compilations that spotlight the takeaways that matter.
  
• Real user voices: Turn insight into impact with user feedback clips and videos. Share insights and download clips to drive product and stakeholder decisions.

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Groundbreaking AI at Your Service

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This tool is powered by AI designed for researchers, product owners, and designers. This isn’t just transcription or summarization, it’s intelligence tailored to surface the insights that matter most. It’s like having a personal AI research assistant, accelerating analysis and automating your workflow without compromising quality. No more endless footage scrolling.

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The AI used for Interviews as well as all other AI with Optimal is backed by AWS Amazon Bedrock, ensuring that your AI insights are supported with industry-leading protection and compliance.

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Evolving Optimal Interviews

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A big thank you to our early access users! Your feedback helped us focus on making Optimal Interviews even better. Here's what's new:

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• Speed and easy access to insights: More video clips, instant download, and bookmark options to make sharing findings faster than ever.
• Privacy: Disable video playback while still extracting insights from transcripts and get PII redaction for English audio alongside transcripts and insights.
• Trust: Our enhanced, best-in-class AI chat experience lets teams explore patterns and themes confidently.
• Expanded study capability: You can now upload up to 20 videos per Interviews study.

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What’s Next: The Future of Moderated Interviews in Optimal

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This new tool is just the beginning. Our vision is to help you manage the entire moderated interview process inside Optimal, from recruitment to scheduling to analysis and sharing.

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Here’s what’s coming:

• View your scheduled sessions directly within Optimal. Link up with your own calendar.
  
• Connect seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams.‍‍
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Imagine running your full end-to-end interview workflow, all in one platform. That’s where we’re heading, and Interviews is our first step.
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Ready to Explore?

Interviews is available now for our latest Optimal plans with study limits. Start transforming your footage into minutes of clarity and bring your users’ voices to the center of every decision. We can’t wait to see what you uncover.

‍Get started with Interviews.‍

AI prototyping isn’t just a side experiment anymore. It’s quickly becoming a real advantage for product and design teams. According to a 2025 industry report, companies using AI prototyping tools saw a 35% increase in development efficiency and a 25% improvement in user adoption rates compared to traditional coding methods.
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The takeaway? Rapid prototyping with AI doesn’t just save time. It’s driving measurable product impact.
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What Is AI Prototyping?

AI prototyping turns simple text prompts into interactive, functional prototypes. You can describe your design concept in plain English e.g. "I want to create a flight booking webpage to review a checkout flow" and minutes later, you have a working, clickable prototype. 
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AI prototyping can also suggest layouts, flows, and components and lets you experiment without writing a single line of code. You can easily experiment with multiple design concepts and seamlessly transition from idea to testable prototype.
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You bring the design thinking. AI handles the build.
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Why AI Prototyping Matters for Product Teams

Product teams today are under pressure to ship faster without compromising quality. AI prototyping addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks in product development: turning ideas into something realistic enough to test.
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Instead of debating static mockups in meetings, you can put a clickable experience in front of users and make decisions based on evidence.
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Popular AI Prototyping Tools

Here are some widely used AI prototyping tools to explore:

• Figma Make
• Lovable
• Replit
• v0
• Bolt.new
• Base44
• Magic Patterns
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How to Use AI Prototyping Tools with Optimal

AI prototyping gets you to a clickable experience quickly. Optimal helps you validate it with real users.

Here’s a step-by-step workflow to combine both:
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1. Generate your prototype
   
   • Prompt your AI tool with the desired layout or flow.
   • Publish and copy the shareable URL.
2. Create a Live Site Test in Optimal
   
   • Add your AI-generated prototype URL along with key tasks.
   • Recruit participants and observe real-time interactions.
3. Watch video recordings
   
   • Identify friction points, confusion, and usability issues.
4. Extra tip: Add recordings into Optimal Interviews
   
   • Import your live site testing recordings to Optimal Interviews.
   • Get automated insights and highlight reels powered by AI.
   • Dig deeper into your session with AI Chat.
5. Iterate and refine
   
   • Adjust your prototype based on insights.
   • Repeat testing.

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Getting started 

Here’s how we recommend getting started. Pick something where you can experiment with low stakes and learn without pressure. Sign in to Optimal or sign up for a free trial and start testing. 

This isn’t about replacing design expertise. It’s about shifting time and energy toward understanding user needs and iterating based on evidence. AI can handle the heavy lifting of generating prototypes. Your team can focus on strategy, clarity, and experience quality.

The result? Faster validation. Smarter decisions. Better products. 

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