Announcing the winners of the 2026 Optimal Experience Awards

Optimal gets used for a lot of research that nobody outside the team ever sees. A card sort that reshapes a navigation menu. A week of usability sessions that kills a feature before it ships. We started the Optimal Experience Awards to put some of that work in front of an audience for once, and this year's entries made the judges' job hard in the best way.

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This year the panel scored hundreds of entries across six categories, with 14 judges reading every submission against the same rubric. Judges weighed the method behind the work as much as what came of it.

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Why we do this

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Good research tends to disappear into the decision it supported. That's sort of the point of it. A good outcome looks obvious once it ships, and nobody outside the room remembers the months of interviews and testing that got the team there. It makes the work hard to point to later. A new researcher can't easily learn from something they never got to see.

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The Optimal Experience Awards is one way to work against that. We wanted the researcher who spent a year winning back a skeptical stakeholder to get the same spotlight as whatever they eventually helped ship. Reading the studies in the open, including the parts that didn't work, makes everyone doing this work sharper.

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How judging worked

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Every entry got scored by more than one judge, working independently, against six criteria specific to its category. Research for Social Good weighed participant protection and replicability heavily. In Outstanding User Research Project, rigor carried more weight, along with how well the method fit the problem. Those scores got combined into a per-category ranking.

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Now, the results.

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Outstanding User Research Project

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This category comes down to one project, how it was built and whether anyone downstream could use what it found.

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Winner:  EE

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Finalists: Southern New Hampshire University, Google, Contentsquare

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Research-Driven Impact

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Here the panel looked past the study design and asked what changed because the research happened.

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Winner:  Paper Leaf

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Finalists: Joruney Digital, Drexel University

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UX Research Leader of the Year

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This category looks at one person's body of work, the practice they built and the people they brought up behind them.

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Winner:  Dawn Ta, Director of Research & Design at Scientella

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Finalists: Dr. Meg Kurdziolek, Sarah Geden, Aline Lin

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Collaborative Research Excellence

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This category looks for collaboration that shaped how the research got built, across teams or organizations, from the ground up.

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Winner: Oxford University

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Finalists: Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), London Borough of Camden, Miro

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Research for Social Good

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Judges paid close attention to how well participants were protected here, and to how much the findings ended up helping the people the study was about.

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Winner: Base22 LLC

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Finalists: Analog Devices, Minnesota IT Services

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Best Use of Optimal

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This category rewards how well the tools fit the study, and what came out of that choice.

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Winner: NHS England

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Finalists: American Electric Power, Cengage, Eaton

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Thank You

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Thanks to everyone who put a project in front of a panel of people they don't know. That's not a small thing to do.

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Thanks to the judges too, for the time they spent going through every entry closely enough to argue about a few of them: Graham Gardner (U.S. Bank), Addison English, Harry Parkes (Hargreaves Lansdowne), Erietta Sapounakis (Stan.), Tradd Salvo (Huge), John Rainey (Gallos Technologies), David Vuu (Telstra Health), Joann Wu (Uber), Alexander Wilson (T. Rowe Price), Kate Towsey (The ResearchOps Review), Christina Goldschmidt (Warner Music Group).

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If your team did work this year that belongs on this list next time, we want to see it.

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A well-maintained participant panel is more than a time-saver. It sets your team up for better research from day one. The people you recruit and how you track, segment, and manage those relationships over time directly shapes how reliable your findings are.  

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With the right setup in place, you can move forward with confidence, knowing that these participants meet your criteria, aren’t overused, and can bring fresh perspectives to each study.

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Tools like Rally UXR bring that structure to participant recruitment. It helps you build and manage your own participant panel, keep track of consent and contact history, coordinate logistics, and stay on top of all the moving parts. You can also see things like incentive history and email engagement, making it much easier to decide who to invite and when.

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But recruitment is just the starting point. The real value comes next: running the research and turning participant feedback into insights you can actually use.

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Using Rally + Optimal together

Whether you’re running unmoderated studies, testing designs, navigation, or content, or conducting usability testing calls, having the right research tools in place is critical. If you’re already using Rally, pairing it with Optimal can connect the dots from recruitment through to insights, without adding friction to your workflow.
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You can also use Optimal’s on-demand or custom managed recruitment services, though Rally’s strength lies in building your own custom panel and database.
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Here’s how to combine Rally and Optimal into a smooth, efficient research workflow.
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Start with intentional recruitment

Define your participant criteria in Rally. Use screening questions not just to qualify participants. Think beyond “does this person qualify?” and start building segments you can reuse: power users vs. casual users, returning users vs. first-timers, people familiar with the old design vs. new. These segments can make it easier to run focused studies and compare results over time.

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Build your study in parallel

A simple shift that makes a big difference: don’t wait. Build your study in Optimal before sending invites from Rally. This ensures that when participants are ready, the link can be dropped into Rally, and distribution happens the moment you're ready.

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Use the strengths of each platform

Rally handles the relationship and profile management: who's been invited, who's confirmed, who needs a reminder, screener and survey history, consent forms, and more. Optimal handles the research: collecting quantitative and qualitative data, visualising patterns, quantifying usability issues, automating insights with AI, and surfacing the metrics and insights that actually answer your research question. 

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With Optimal, you can immediately put Rally-recruited participants into studies including:
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• Prototype testing
• Live site testing 
• Card sorting
• Tree testing
• First-click testing
• Surveys
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Keep your insights in one place‍‍

When it comes to research, scattered insights = lost impact. Using Optimal as your central hub for results, recordings, and analysis makes it easier to share findings with your team and stakeholders, track progress over time, and back up decisions with real evidence. 
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The tools you use for recruitment and the tools you use for research aren't just operational choices. They shape your research culture. When recruitment and research are both well-structured, everything runs more smoothly. Teams that invest in structure on both ends of the workflow tend to produce research that's faster, more credible, and more likely to influence decisions. 
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Rally and Optimal are powerful on their own. Together, they create a workflow that’s scalable, insight-driven, and built for continuous discovery.

If you're not yet using Optimal, you can start a free trial or book a demo.

Recruiting the right participants is one of the biggest challenges teams face when conducting user research. Poor quality or disengaged testers can lead to unreliable data. While bottlenecks in recruitment – long lead times and limited access – can delay studies, reduce research frequency, and slow product development. 

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Having flexible options helps you keep moving at pace. Whether you bring your own participants, use Optimal’s recruitment services, or leverage external panel providers, Optimal gives you the flexibility to recruit the right user testers consistently and efficiently so you can launch studies faster, run them more frequently, and quickly scale research across multiple projects.

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Here’s a breakdown of your recruitment options with Optimal:

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1.  Invite Your Own Participants For Free

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Optimal lets you invite your own participants with a study link, QR code, or intercept snippet at no extra cost, giving you full control over who takes part in your studies.

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2. Use Any Panel Provider You Prefer

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Optimal works seamlessly with any panel provider, such as User Interviews, Respondent, PureSpectrum, Prolific, Dynata, Askable, and Cint.

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How it works:

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1. Create and publish an unmoderated study in Optimal, such as a live site test, prototype test, survey, first-click test, card sort or tree test.
2. Specify your audience criteria in the panel platform.
3. Add screener questions in your panel provider and/or Optimal.
4. Add your Optimal study link into the panel provider platform.
5. Panel provider recruits participants and manages incentives.
6. See a participant list in Optimal and review participant metrics like completion rate, time taken, and location breakdown.
7. Optional: Create segments in Optimal for more targeted insights.
8. Review insights, results, and analytics in Optimal to make informed research decisions.

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Certain panel providers, like User Interviews, offer additional benefits through direct integration with Optimal. You can automate participant tracking and see participant status in real time in your panel provider platform as user testers complete your studies.

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3. Use Optimal’s Specialized Recruitment Services

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For teams that want expert support, Optimal Recruitment support taps into multiple panels to access over 20 million participants across 150 countries. Whether you're looking for a broad audience or something highly specific, we can help you find the right people to take part in your study.

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Optimal handles the panel selection, incentive management, and criteria refinement. We’ll even review and optimize your screener questions. Get started by submitting your criteria. 

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4. Use Optimal’s Recruitment Panel

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Looking for another quick recruitment solution? You can order user testers instantly inside the Optimal platform. It’s ideal for B2C research and studies with basic demographic requirements, and Optimal takes care of incentives for you.

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Recruitment Flexibility and Quality

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You’re never locked into a single approach with Optimal. Instead, you can adapt your recruitment strategy to each study, balancing speed, quality, budget, and scale, while using the same research and user insights platform.

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From shareable study links to easy panel workflows and expert support when you need it, you can spend less time managing recruitment and more time gathering actionable user insights.