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. 

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

Prototype Testing

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

‍

Live Site Testing

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

‍

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.

‍

AI: Automate the Busywork, Focus on the Breakthroughs

‍

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 
  ‍

AI handles the tedious parts so you can focus on the meaningful ones.

‍

Looking Ahead: Raising the Bar for UX Research & Insights

‍

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

We're entering a phase where research and insights becomes:
‍

• faster to run
• easier to communicate
• available to everyone on your team
• and infinitely more powerful with AI woven throughout your workflow

‍

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.


‍

Onwards and upwards.

The pace of product development has never been faster, and the cost of building on assumptions has never been higher. At Optimal, we've spent nearly two decades helping teams get closer to their users, and what we're seeing right now is a fundamental shift in how research gets done. More teams are running research than ever before and timelines to act on findings are tighter, while the expectations for what research needs to deliver keep rising. 

‍

That shift is exactly what's driving Optimal 3.0, our most ambitious reinvention of the platform yet, designed to give every team the speed, depth, and flexibility that modern research demands. Today's release is the next step in that journey.

‍

Optimal's new mixed-methods research tool tears down the boundaries between methods. It brings prototype testing, live site testing, and surveys into a single, end-to-end study workflow. And grounded in our product principles: speed to insights, access for all, and communication. 
‍
‍

‍

A Unified Way to Test Usability
‍

True multi-method research

Optimal’s new Usability Testing tool marks the next step in the evolution of Optimal 3.0, giving teams the flexibility to evaluate experiences in whatever form they exist today.
‍

• Early-stage ideas and concepts
• Interactive prototypes
• AI-generated or experimental flows
• Live production experiences
• Competitor or benchmark sites
• Surveys and structured feedback
  ‍

Combine prototype testing, AI prototype testing, live site testing, and surveys in a single study. Test multiple prototypes side by side, compare different live URLs, or mix prototype and live site tasks together all in one workflow. Research can now mirror how products actually evolve, from early concept to shipped experience.
‍

‍

Richer qualitative insight collection

New speak-aloud question types, custom message blocks, auto-generated transcripts and insights, citations and highlight clips help you capture the context and reasoning behind every action. AI-assisted analysis then helps you make sense of it all fast and communicate with impact.
‍

‍

A redesigned results and insights layer

Review a study overview surfacing key themes, pain points, and sentiment analysis combining insights across all your study methods along with detailed results, task analysis and recordings, transcripts, key quotes, and automatically generated citations and video clips. 

‍

Coming soon: you can also use AI Chat to chat with your data directly, asking questions and pulling new insights and evidence across all your qualitative and quantitative inputs.

‍
‍

Six ways to put it to work

‍

1. Compare design variations in a single study, such as multiple navigation layouts, checkout flows, or onboarding concepts
2. Explore early-stage concepts before committing to build
3. Benchmark current live experience vs a redesigned prototype
4. Test staging vs production, or two campaign landing pages
5. Validate end-to-end journeys from concept to live experiences
6. Compare your experience against competitors‍

‍
Why this matters

Modern product development is no longer linear. Teams continuously move between:
‍

• Discovery and validation
• Design and iteration
• Prototype and production
• Concept and reality
  ‍

Traditional usability testing tools were not built for this fluidity.  Optimal’s Usability Testing brings the flexibility to match how teams actually work today.

By combining multiple methods into a single study and pairing it with AI-powered synthesis, Usability Testing helps teams reduce setup and analysis time, recruit once, capture richer qualitative context, compare experiences more easily, move faster from feedback to action, and tell clearer, more compelling insight stories. 
‍

Learn how to get started with Usability Testing in Optimal and accelerate your path from idea to insight. Book a meeting, start exploring in your account, or join our live training webinar on June 24th to see it in action.

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.

‍

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.

‍
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.

‍

Interviews, Reimagined

‍

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:

‍‍

• 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.

‍

‍

Groundbreaking AI at Your Service

‍

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.

‍
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.

‍

Evolving Optimal Interviews

‍

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:

‍

• 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.

‍

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

‍

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.

‍

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.‍‍
  ‍

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.
‍

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.‍