Accelerate Study Creation with the New Study Flow

Inspired by insights from Optimal users, we’ve reimagined study creation to bring you a beautifully streamlined experience with the new Study Flow tab.

With the new Study Flow, you’ll: 

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⚡ Enjoy faster study set up: Messages & instructions and Questionnaire tabs are combined in a single tab - called Study Flow - for faster editing and settings customization.

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✨ See it all at a glance: Easily visualize and understand the participant experience—from the welcome message to the final thank-you screen—every step of the way. 

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🎯 Duplicate questions: Save time and quickly replicate questions for surveys, screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions. 

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⭐ Experience enhanced UI: Enjoy a modern, clean design with intuitive updates that minimize scrolling and reduce mental load.

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🗂️ Collapse and expand sections: Easily navigate studies by collapsing and expanding sections, making it easier to build out specific parts of your study.

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This Study Flow tab is available across all Optimal tools, except for Qualitative Insights. 

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What’s next?

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We’re not stopping there. We have some significant improvements on the horizon designed to give you even greater flexibility and control.

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Advanced logic: Enhanced logic capabilities is one of our most highly requested features, and we’re thrilled to introduce new capabilities to help you build your ideal study experience – available for surveys and other tools. We will first introduce “display logic”, allowing for: 

• If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show Question Z.
• If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show specific answer options.

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Customizable sections: Organize your questions into different sections to build a better study experience for your participants. For example, segment your questions into relevant groupings, such as demographics or product usage. With custom sections, you can add new sections, rename, reorder, duplicate, and move questions between different sections.* 

*Note: Questions cannot be moved to/from the screening questions section.

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These upcoming features will empower you to create dynamic, tailored study experiences for different audiences with ease for more valuable insights. 

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Start exploring the new Study Flow now.

Creating successful products is tough. Whether you're gathering competitive intelligence before entering a market, discovering user needs for a brand new product, redesigning a website, optimizing a sign-up flow, or improving internal tools, the stakes are high.

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Poor user experiences cost businesses up to 35% of potential sales, while organizations that deliver superior experiences drive 5-6x more revenue. Optimal helps you turn user insights into better business decisions so you can deliver products your users love.

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From Discovery to Continuous Optimization

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Great products don’t just happen. They’re guided by real user feedback at every stage.

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Start with discovery.
Use live site testing to watch real users navigate competitor experiences or test early concepts in staging environments. Combine this with surveys and interview insights to understand what users actually need. Validate navigation and information architecture with card sorting and tree testing.

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Validate before you build.
With prototype testing, you can connect to Figma or create clickable prototypes in minutes or use live site testing to test a website or web app in a staging environment. Identify pain points early and fix them before development.

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Continuously optimize.
Even after launch, the best experiences evolve with their users. Ongoing testing, surveys, and interviews can reveal opportunities to refine and grow, keeping your product relevant and effective.

But nothing beats seeing users interact with your actual site. With Optimal’s newest tool - live site testing - you can see how users engage with your actual websites or web apps or even a competitor's. No guesswork, no assumptions.

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Introducing Live Site Testing

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We’re excited to announce live site testing has officially joined Optimal’s platform! Here’s what makes it powerful:

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• Test any live site. Yes, any.
  ‍Understand exactly how users interact with your website or web app in a production or staging environment or gain valuable insights by testing a competitor’s site.
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• ‍No code. No friction.
  Unlike many other live site testing tools, with Optimal, setup takes minutes. There's no plugins or technical hurdles for you or your testers. Just paste a URL to set up your test and start testing.
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• ‍Validate at every stage.
  Catch issues before they cost you conversions. Identify blockers pre-launch on staging sites or improve existing user flows on live sites.
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• ‍Video recordings with real insights
  Watch exactly where users hesitate, struggle, or abandon their journey. Back every decision with user feedback and evidence and confidently prioritize your next decisions.‍‍
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Why This Matters

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With live site testing, you get real insights from real user interactions beyond quantitative data.

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The result?

• Better competitive insights and analysis
• Fewer surprises post-launch
• Improved usability
• Higher conversion or adoption rates
• Increased user or customer satisfaction
• Faster, data-backed decisions
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Live site testing is now available for all plans, except for our legacy Individual plan. 

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Already an Optimal user? Log in now to start testing your websites and web apps. 

Not yet using Optimal? Get started with a free trial to try it for yourself.

As we approach the end of 2024, it’s a great time to reflect on the progress we’ve made as a community and at Optimal. This year, Optimal users launched over 100,000 studies with over 1.2 million participants sharing insights to drive better business decisions and experiences.

Here's how we’ve worked to make research more accessible, speed up insight discovery, empower enterprise teams, and grow our platform’s capabilities in 2024.

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Democratizing Research

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Research for All
Research shouldn’t be limited to specialists or select teams—it should be accessible to everyone. In 2024, we focused on breaking down barriers to user research so that individuals across all divisions and teams can uncover actionable insights. Our tools are built to help anyone make confident, user-centered decisions, and this year, we’ve seen Optimal users from across all different types of teams, including product, marketing, content, research, design, information architecture, and education. We work to make our platform easy to use and learn, ensuring everyone can dive into research without barriers, regardless of their role or experience.

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A Milestone Year for UX Maturity
Understanding and improving UX maturity became a key focus for organizations this year. We launched our comprehensive UX Maturity Framework, complete with assessment tools that help teams identify their current state and plot a path forward. To support this journey, we developed detailed playbooks for each maturity level, offering practical guidance for teams looking to level up their UX practice. ‍‍‍

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Demonstrating the Value of UX
The conversation around UX value also took center stage in 2024. Our groundbreaking research into quantifying UX impact provided organizations with concrete data to support their UX investments. Through our popular webinar and blog series, we explored different approaches to communicating UX value to stakeholders, giving practitioners the tools they need to advocate for user-centered design.

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Accelerating Insight Discovery

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Prototype Testing
This year, we introduced Prototype Testing, enabling teams to test designs early and often. Teams can iterate quickly and ensure their ideas resonate with users before committing to development.

Video Recording (Beta)
We added a new feature to Prototype Testing that captures screen, audio and nonverbal cues—such as frustration—providing deeper insights into your users' experiences.

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Figma Integration
We also launched Figma integration for First-Click Testing and Prototype Testing, allowing users to connect design prototypes directly to Optimal studies. This integration makes it easier than ever to test, refine, and align designs with user needs—all without leaving Optimal.

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AI-Powered Insights
Our AI-Powered Insights help to uncover patterns and themes in qualitative and interview data. By analyzing large datasets, AI helps you discover key trends and accelerate decision-making.

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Optimal Recruitment
Recruiting high-quality participants can be a huge hassle and very time-consuming. That’s why we’ve relaunched Optimal Recruitment with expanded profiling capabilities, enhanced quality controls, and full-service support—to let you focus on what matters most: powerful insights to drive better business outcomes

Enabling Enterprise Teams

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Workspaces
For organizations with complex structures, we’ve introduced Workspaces and Projects to give admins greater control, improved organization, and increased privacy controls. Whether you're part of a large enterprise or a growing team, these enhancements simplify governance and amplify impact.

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Expanding Platform Capabilities in 2025

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Looking Ahead
As we head into 2025, our roadmap is packed with exciting features and improvements to make research more accessible, efficient, and impactful. Expect advancements across our platform, including video recording for prototype testing, a brand new survey tool with improved usability, advanced logic, and AI-powered capabilities to meet the evolving needs of teams worldwide. The best is yet to come - stay tuned and see you in 2025!