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