7 Ways to Use AI Chat to Boost Collaboration in Mural, FigJam, and Miro

Collaboration tools like Mural, FigJam, and Miro are staples of how modern teams can brainstorm, map ideas, align on plans, and build together. But a canvas alone can't tell you if you're on the right track or guide you to what comes next when progress stalls. That's where Optimal AI Chat and user insights come in.

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By starting or bringing real user insights into the boards your team already works in, you can reduce ambiguity, ground discussions in real research, and accelerate decision-making. 

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Here are 7 ways to use AI Chat alongside your collaboration boards.

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1. Align on key objectives

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Before your next planning session, use Optimal AI Chat to surface relevant insights from your interview recordings. Add a summary directly into your Mural, Miro, or FigJam board so everyone comes in with the same context and understanding of the objectives. Instead of starting with assumptions, your team can start with real user insights and clear trade-offs to discuss.
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Try this prompt: "Summarize the key considerations for [decision topic] and flag any trade-offs we should discuss as a team."
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2. Create a user journey map

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AI Chat can analyze interview transcripts and video recordings and highlight common jobs to be done, behaviors, and friction points. You can then map those steps visually on your board and identify where the experience breaks down.
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Try these prompts: “Summarize the typical jobs to be done for the people we interviewed.”
“For this job you identified [paste job details], detail the journey steps.” 

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3. Turn pain points into design and product decisions

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AI Chat can analyze recurring themes from your interview recordings and convert them into concrete opportunities your team can explore next. Adding these to your board gives the team a clear starting point rather than a vague list of problems.
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Try this prompt:  "Based on these pain points [paste notes or themes], suggest three product improvements we could explore."

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4. Sharpen your marketing messaging

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Interview insights aren’t just valuable for product, research, and design teams. Marketing teams can also use AI Chat to quickly evaluate messaging, positioning, and customer perception.

When running preference or concept testing interviews, AI Chat can quickly analyze the feedback and suggest positioning directions you can workshop on your board.
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Try this prompt: “Suggest positioning options based on the interview feedback.”

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5. Facilitate workshops

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Running workshops and brainstorming sessions with cross-functional teams can be challenging. Conversations drift, discussions stall, and teams sometimes struggle to focus on the most important issues. 
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AI Chat can help you structure the conversation before the workshop even begins by generating discussion guides based on user insights from your interviews. Add the chat outputs directly to your board to guide the session.
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Try this prompt: “Generate a structured discussion guide based on the pain points of the interviewees.”


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6. Make brainstorming more focused

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Open brainstorming can be valuable. It can also be chaotic without clear direction. By leveraging AI Chat, you can guide your brainstorming sessions with intelligent suggestions, topic generation, and idea organization.
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Try this prompt: “Generate 10 brainstorm ideas based on these user insights and group them into themes we could explore.”

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7. Map complex processes

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Visualizing complex processes and systems is easier with tools like Miro, FigJam, and Mural. AI Chat can help you map out each step. AI Chat can help break down a process step-by-step, highlighting decisions, dependencies, and potential friction points based on your interviews. Your team can then map these steps visually and identify opportunities for improvement.
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Try this prompt: “Create a step-by-step process map for how users complete [task], including key decisions and potential friction points.”

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Using Optimal AI Chat for seamless collaboration

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The best collaboration happens when teams have the right information at the right time. 

Optimal AI Chat gives your team a jumpstart for your interview analysis: clearer inputs, faster synthesis, and smarter outputs that translate directly into what you're building on your boards.

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Whether you're running a workshop, mapping a user journey, or planning a product launch, AI Chat helps you spend less time getting oriented and more time making decisions.
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Ready to see what your team can do with it?
Learn more about best practices for AI Chat or book a demo. 

User interviews have always been one of the most trusted and powerful UX research methods. They give you something beyond dashboards or written surveys: real, in-depth conversations and context.

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But they’ve historically come with a cost – time, coordination, and a heavy lift to review recordings and turn videos into insights. Sometimes insights get buried. Recordings sit unused and research becomes challenging to revisit.

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In our recent webinar, we explored how that’s changing and how you can reduce the heavy lift of interview review, while building a research repository. 

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What is a research repository?

A research repository is a centralized system for storing, analyzing, and reusing research data, especially qualitative data like user interviews. It helps teams answer questions like what users said, what patterns emerged, and how past research can inform future decisions.
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For interviews, this means:

• Storing recordings and transcripts
• Organizing insights and themes
• Making research searchable
• Enabling teams to revisit past findings
• Supporting continuous discovery
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Optimal Interviews brings this to life by automatically capturing recordings, generating transcripts, structuring insights from the start, and making everything searchable so teams can easily revisit, build on, and continuously learn from their research.
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So what did we learn? Here are some key takeaways from this webinar, plus answers to the most common questions we heard.
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1. The biggest bottleneck isn’t conducting interviews. It’s everything surrounding it.

Running interviews isn’t just about talking to users. It’s everything before and after:

• Recruiting participants
• Coordinating calendars
• Managing reschedules and no-shows
• Setting up emails and reminders
• Transcribing, organizing, and synthesizing findings
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That overhead adds up quickly. There’s opportunity in automating these workflows and removing the friction around them. Optimal Interviews solves this by:
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• Creating a central calendar
• Emailing participants with confirmations and session reminders
• Automatically capturing recordings
• Generating transcripts
• Uploading and generating summaries and insights
• Structuring insights from the start
• Allowing you to explore instantly with AI Chat
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2. Speed matters more than ever (and it’s finally achievable)

Research isn’t slowing down. Product cycles are getting faster, and teams expect insights just as quickly.

What stood out most:

• Interviews can now go from recording → transcript → insights in minutes
• Teams can share highlight reels, clips and findings almost immediately
• Analysis can start while context is still fresh
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One team told us that a few years ago it took them three weeks to analyze user interviews for an initiative. When they replicated the same study in Optimal Interviews, they were able to generate usable insights in about five minutes.
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That shift from lagging insight to near real-time understanding is where the real impact lies.

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3. Scheduling should feel effortless

Interview scheduling sounds simple, but it’s often where things break down.
You can use Optimal Interviews to ensure:
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• Availability blocks with buffers
• Controlled rescheduling and cancellations
• Video conferencing integrations
• Support for collaborators
• Built-in, secure participant communication & messaging (coming soon)
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When done right, scheduling fades into the background so teams can focus on conversations, not coordination.
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4. AI is reshaping analysis but humans stay in control

AI is already proving its value in the analysis phase:

• Automatic transcription across multiple languages
• Theme and insight extraction across interviews
• Highlight reels and supporting evidence
• Natural language queries over your research
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But one point came through clearly: AI accelerates analysis but it doesn’t replace human judgment and sensitivity.
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Researchers still play a critical role in validating insights, interpreting nuance, and deciding what matters for the business. Think of AI as getting you to 80% faster, while you own the final 20%.

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5. The real unlock is continuous, reusable research

Here’s what you can achieve with Optimal Interviews:

• You can ask questions of past interviews using natural language
• Create new custom themes or topics on demand for AI to add new insights into
• Re-analyze old research with fresh context
• Add new interviews to your existing Optimal Interviews study and refresh the insights
• Identify gaps and spin up new studies faster
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This turns research from static storage into something dynamic, something you can continuously mine and build on.
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FAQs from the Webinar

Does the platform synthesize insights or just aggregate data?

Both. You can extract insights from individual interviews, but the real value often comes from patterns across multiple sessions. Aggregation helps surface stronger, more reliable themes, while still preserving standout moments from single participants.
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How is sensitive data handled?

Privacy is a core focus and consideration with Optimal Interviews. Some of the key protections include automatic redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) and enterprise-grade AI infrastructure with strict data isolation. We're also looking to expand Optimal Interviews anonymized scheduling and communication and manual redaction controls before analysis.
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What if I can’t connect my video conferencing tools?

Integrations are available for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. 

You can still run everything without integrations:

• Set availability without integrations
• Add conferencing links yourself
• Manage sessions independently
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Integrations are helpful but not required.
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Can I search across multiple studies?

Today, teams often bring relevant interviews into one project for analysis. Looking ahead, the goal is broader. Optimal’s looking into how the platform can search and query across all research, use AI chat to explore insights across studies, and surface insights at a Workspace level.
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Can I query transcripts or AI summaries?

Yes. You can search transcripts directly and use AI-powered chat to explore themes, generate summaries, or even turn findings into shareable outputs like Slack posts or reports.

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Final thought

Interviews aren’t new. But the way we run them and what we can get out of them is changing fast.

By removing operational overhead and reducing time to insight, teams can talk to users more often, share insights faster, and build a research repository that becomes part of everyday product decision-making.
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If you want to experience the full walkthrough, demo, and Q&A from the session, we encourage you to watch the full webinar.
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👉 You can watch the full training webinar here.

Live site testing is now part of the Optimal platform and is designed to give you real insights from real user interactions without code, installs, or complicated setups. 

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If you missed our recent Live Site Testing Training webinar or want a refresher, we’ll get you up to speed with this recap of all the key insights. 

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What is Live Site Testing?

Optimal’s live site testing lets you watch users navigate any website or web app, including your own staging or production site, or even competitor experiences. It’s all about understanding how people behave in the environments they actually use, helping you identify friction points you might otherwise miss.

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Key Takeaways From the Training

1. Context Is Everything

In usability research, the “real world” often looks very different from controlled prototype tests. People use their own devices, have distractions, and bring patterns and expectations shaped by real life. Foundational research shows the richest insights often come from observing users in these real contexts.

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Live site testing is built to reflect that reality, helping you answer not just if someone completes a task, but how they approach it and why they struggle. 

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2. Testing Is Fast and Friction‑Free

One of the biggest barriers to live site testing historically is complexity, needing code snippets, extensions, or technical setup. Optimal’s tool removes all that friction so you can see natural behaviour without influence or disruption:

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• No code or installs required
• Paste a URL and you’re ready to go
• You can test as often as you want - during discovery, before launch, after launch, or anytime in between - and any site you want
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3. Design Tests With Real‑Life Scenarios

When crafting tasks for live site testing, think about real user goals. Asking people to complete realistic tasks (e.g., find a product, book a flight, compare two pages) and encouraging them to think out loud leads to much richer insights than purely metric‑focused tests. You can also mix tasks with survey questions for quantitative data. 
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4. Participant Experience Is Built for Natural Interaction

A big part of getting real behavior is ensuring participants feel comfortable and unencumbered. Optimal’s built-in task window is readily available when needed but otherwise minimizes to stay out of the way. This flow helps people stay focused and act naturally, which directly improves the quality of insights you collect.
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5. Combine Live Site Testing with Optimal’s Interviews Tool‍

For even deeper insights, pair live site testing with Optimal Interviews. Once you upload live site testing recordings, you get automated insights, transcripts, summaries, as well as highlight reels in Interviews. You can also explore further with AI chat, so you can quickly uncover quotes, compare experiences, and answer ad‑hoc questions.
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This combination doesn’t just make analysis faster; it helps you convince stakeholders with clear, digestible, and compelling evidence from real user behaviour. Instead of long reports, you can present snackable, actionable insights that drive alignment and decisions.

Looking Ahead

We’re evolving live site testing at Optimal with solution testing, a multi-method approach that combines prototypes, live sites, and surveys in a single study. This will let teams capture even richer insights with speak-aloud tasks, automated analysis, highlight reels, and AI chat, making it faster and easier to understand user behavior and share compelling findings.

FAQs Highlights

Can you test staging or test environments and sites behind a password or firewall?

Yes, Optimal's live site testing tool works with any URL, including staging and test environments as well as sites behind a password or firewall.

You can share specific instructions with participants before they start. For example, if participants need to create an account and you don’t want that recorded, you can ask them to do this in advance via the welcome screen. That way, when the study begins, they’re already logged in.
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Will live site testing affect my live website or real data?
No, user testers interacting with a live site test cannot make any changes to your website or its data.

What permissions are needed to test competitor websites?
With Optimal’s live site testing, you don't need special approval or permissions to evaluate public competitors' experiences.

Access the Training

If you want to experience the full walkthrough, demo, and Q&A from the session, we encourage you to watch the full webinar! You’ll learn how to start running your own live site tests and uncover real user behavior, plus pick up tips and best practices straight from the training.

👉 Watch the full training webinar here.