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

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.

Since launching Optimal Interviews in December, we've been tracking closely as research, product, and design teams put it to the test. The tool is driving a real transformation in workflows, and we’re energized by the feedback so far.

‍

• “What took me manually 3 weeks to analyze 4 years ago, with the AI functionality, now took me less than 5 minutes. It’s crazy!”
• “This changes everything for how we work with interview data.”
• “The insights were spot on, and I was impressed by how well the tool understood the themes in the interview.”
• "I tried it for the first time this week. I was impressed by the amount of insights." 

‍

Optimal Interviews was built to remove the friction from one of research's most time-intensive steps: analyzing interview recordings. With automated transcription, AI-generated insights, highlight reels, summaries, and citations, the tool transforms hours of manual review into something that happens in minutes.

‍

But we’re not done yet. We’re constantly building and evolving based on your feedback. With the latest releases like automatic recording, every session can now be captured and stored automatically, helping teams build a centralized user research repository and supporting continuous research.

‍

Here’s a look at how teams are using Optimal Interviews, the latest work in this space, and where we’re headed.
‍

‍

‍

How Teams Are Using Optimal Interviews

‍

Researchers across industries are leveraging Optimal Interviews in a variety of ways. Here are just a few examples from current users:

‍

• Understanding customer interactions with voice assistants and AI to inform user experience and product development.
  
  
• Studying habits, purchasing patterns, and customer frustrations to optimize experiences and conversions.
  
  
• Evaluating how users navigate and interact with customer-facing websites to improve user experience.
  
  
• Gathering feedback from employees about internal tools and systems to improve workplace efficiency and satisfaction.

‍

‍

‍

Recent Enhancements: New Features for More Automation

‍

It’s been a busy few months, and we’ve shipped several meaningful updates over the past few months. Here’s what’s new:
‍

1. Multilanguage Support for Global Research

Optimal Interviews now supports 13 languages, automatically detecting and transcribing interviews in their original languages. AI Chat is also ready to assist your team in these languages, ensuring a seamless experience no matter what language your team is using.
‍

‍

2. Video Conferencing Integrations

‍
‍Sync Optimal Interviews with your Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams account to automatically generate and attach meeting links to sessions scheduled with the Optimal scheduler.
‍

‍

3. Automatic Recording

You can choose to automatically record and upload sessions scheduled through Optimal, eliminating the need for manual uploads. Sessions can now be captured and stored automatically, enabling teams to conduct continuous research. Accumulate insights over time in a central repository, where they remain always accessible and ready to be explored further with AI Chat.
‍

‍

4. Custom Topics

Custom topics allow you to define specific areas of interest for AI to focus on for interview insights. As more recordings are added, the tool will automatically generate insights based on these topics, so you can easily filter and focus on the data that matters most to you.

‍

What’s Next for Optimal Interviews

Our ultimate goal? To keep finding ways to reduce manual effort. Let Optimal streamline your research workflow, automate time-consuming tasks, and help you build out your qualitative research repository.

‍

We have a number of significant additions in development, including:
‍

Calendar Integrations

Sync you and your team’s calendars (Google and Microsoft) with Optimal Interviews so you can easily schedule and sync you and your team’s interview availability. Avoid double booking and get scheduled sessions automatically added to your calendar.

Enhanced Privacy & Messaging System

Interviewers and participants will be able to message each other directly through Optimal. This helps protect personal contact details e.g. email addresses and reduces unintended bias, such as revealing the study creator’s organization. Teams can coordinate, add clarifications, and follow up more efficiently without exposing personal information.
‍

‍

We'd Love to Hear From You

How are you using Optimal Interviews in your research? What's working well, and what would you like to see us build next?
‍

And if you're just getting started, our Interviews 101 guide is a great place to begin.

‍

Want to learn more about how to harness the full potential of Optimal Interviews and AI Chat? Register for this live training.
‍

Optimal Interviews is updated continuously and shaped with feedback from users. Follow our release notes or share your thoughts via live chat or feature request form to give your feedback and stay in the loop.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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. 

‍

‍

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.
‍

For interviews, this means:

• Storing recordings and transcripts
• Organizing insights and themes
• Making research searchable
• Enabling teams to revisit past findings
• Supporting continuous discovery
  ‍

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.
‍

So what did we learn? Here are some key takeaways from this webinar, plus answers to the most common questions we heard.
‍
‍

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
  ‍

That overhead adds up quickly. There’s opportunity in automating these workflows and removing the friction around them. Optimal Interviews solves this by:
‍

• 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
  ‍
  ‍

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
  ‍

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.
‍

That shift from lagging insight to near real-time understanding is where the real impact lies.

‍

3. Scheduling should feel effortless

Interview scheduling sounds simple, but it’s often where things break down.
You can use Optimal Interviews to ensure:
‍

• Availability blocks with buffers
• Controlled rescheduling and cancellations
• Video conferencing integrations
• Support for collaborators
• Built-in, secure participant communication & messaging (coming soon)
  ‍

When done right, scheduling fades into the background so teams can focus on conversations, not coordination.
‍
‍

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
  ‍

But one point came through clearly: AI accelerates analysis but it doesn’t replace human judgment and sensitivity.
‍

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%.

‍

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
  ‍

This turns research from static storage into something dynamic, something you can continuously mine and build on.
‍
‍

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.
‍

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.
‍

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
  ‍

Integrations are helpful but not required.
‍

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.
‍

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.

‍

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.
‍

If you want to experience the full walkthrough, demo, and Q&A from the session, we encourage you to watch the full webinar.
‍

👉 You can watch the full training webinar here.