March 16, 2025

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: 

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.

✨ 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. 

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

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

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

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


What’s next?

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

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.

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.

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

Start exploring the new Study Flow now.

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From Design to Decision: Unlock Deeper Insights with Video Recording for Prototype Testing

We’re excited to launch our video recording functionality for prototype testing, enabling you to dive deeper into the “why” behind user actions and empowering you to make data-informed decisions faster and with greater confidence.

See User Actions Come to Life


Capture the nuance of user interactions with screen, audio, and/or video recording. With Optimal’s video recording feature, you can:

  • Understand Intent: Watch users in action to reveal their decision-making process.
  • Spot Friction Points: Identify moments of hesitation, confusion, or frustration.
  • Test Your Ideas: Leverage user insights to make informed decisions before moving forward.
  • Track Task Success: Combine video insights with quantitative data to understand what works and what needs refinement.
  • Share Compelling Insights: Use recordings to drive alignment across your team and key stakeholders.

Drive Value with Video Recordings and Prototype Testing


By combining video recordings with prototype testing, you can unlock actionable insights that make a real impact. 

Here’s how they drive value for your initiatives:

  • Higher Conversion Rates: Optimized designs based on real user feedback lead to increased engagement.
  • Greater User Satisfaction: Tested prototypes help to better align your experiences with user needs and expectations.
  • Reduced Development Costs: Catch issues early to avoid costly fixes later in the development process.
  • Faster Time-to-Market: Resolve design flaws early to accelerate project timelines.

Recruit the Right Participants for Richer Results


Optimal combines the power of video recording, participant recruitment, and a comprehensive UX insights and research platform to elevate your product and research process.

Use Optimal’s recruitment service to quickly connect you with millions of people in 150+ countries ready to take part in your study. Our in-house team handles feasibility assessments, sends reminders and confirmations, reviews personalized study setups, and conducts human checks to ensure high quality participants to maximize the value of your video recordings.

Thank you, Beta Testers


We’re grateful to our early adopters and beta testers for shaping the future of video recording and prototype testing. Based on your valuable feedback, we’ve made the following updates:

Video recording updates

  • Additional recording controls: You can now control whether to reject participants or forward a participant to a non-recording study link if they do not meet your recording criteria. 
  • Translations: Set your study language and translate the recording instructions into 180+ languages.
  • No video expirations: We’ve removed video expirations, ensuring your recordings remain accessible as long as you have an active Optimal subscription.
  • Improved participant experience: We’ve improved the technology to reduce technical errors, creating a more reliable and user-friendly experience.

Prototype testing updates

  • Collapse/expand and move tasks: Increase prototype visibility by hiding or moving tasks, making it easier for participants to view and interact with more of your design, especially for mobile prototypes.
  • Option to end tasks automatically: When enabled, tasks will automatically end 0.5 seconds after a participant reaches a correct destination, removing the need for participants to confirm that they've completed the task. This can improve the overall participant experience, removing steps and making tests faster to complete.
  • Increased Figma frame limit:  We’ve increased the Figma frame limit from 30 to 100 frames to support larger, more complex prototypes.
  • Expanded task results: Task path results now indicated completed and skipped tasks for better analysis.
  • Time-saving improvements: Auto-select the starting screen after importing a Figma prototype, and enjoy task selection persistence across tabs in the analysis view.
  • Enhanced security: We’ve updated Figma authorization for expanded security for your prototypes.

Ready to unlock the power of video recording?
Get started with a prototype test
in Optimal or visit our help documentation to learn more.

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1 min read

Qualitative insights: Reimagined and supercharged 🚀

We're thrilled to announce the re-launch of our Qualitative Insights tool, formerly known as Reframer. This powerful upgrade brings new features designed to revolutionize your qualitative data analysis process, making it faster, easier, and more insightful than ever before.

Introducing the new Qualitative Insights 🔍

Qualitative Insights has always been your go-to tool to help you plan and organize interviews, take notes, tag, and analyze rich, unstructured data. Now, we've taken it to the next level with two game-changing additions:

  • Insights feature: A dedicated space to capture, organize, and communicate your key takeaways.
  • AI capabilities: Optional AI-powered assistance to accelerate your analysis process.

Discover insights effortlessly 💡 

The new Insights feature transforms how you work with qualitative data:

  • Centralized hub: All your analytical discoveries in one place.
  • Structured insights: Each insight includes a title, detailed description, and associated observations.
  • Flexible viewing: Toggle between overview and deep-dive modes.
  • Efficient organization: Tag and categorize insights for easy retrieval.
  • Collaboration tools: Share and discuss findings with your team.

How it works 🛠️ 

Manual insight creation

  1. Filter your data using keywords, tags, affinity map groupings, tasks, segments, and sessions.
  2. Select relevant observations.
  3. Craft your insight with a custom title and description.

AI-Powered Insight Generation (Optional)

  1. Click "Generate" to activate our AI assistant.
  2. AI analyzes existing observations to produce new insights.
  3. Automatically generates insight titles, summaries, and attaches relevant observations.
  4. AI-generated insights are marked with an AI star symbol for easy identification.
  5. All AI insights remain fully editable.

AI: Your analysis assistant 🤖

Our AI capabilities are designed to enhance your abilities, not replace them. Use AI to:

  • Speed up insight discovery
  • Reveal hidden patterns in your data
  • Jumpstart the analysis process

Remember, your expertise is crucial. Always review and refine AI-generated insights to ensure accuracy and capture nuances that only human understanding can provide.

Your data, your choice 🔒 

We prioritize your privacy and data control:

  • Your data stays within your organization
  • We don't use it to train other AI models
  • You control when to use AI for insights
  • AI features can be turned on or off anytime

Get started today 🌟 

Ready to experience the power of the new Qualitative Insights? Learn more and dive in. Upgrade your qualitative analysis workflow and uncover deeper insights faster than ever before with Qualitative Insights!

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1 min read

Optimal Recruitment Relaunch: More Panels, Better Quality, Zero Hassle

Recruiting high quality participants can be a hassle and 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.

What does Optimal Recruitment offer?

With Optimal Recruitment, our in-house team makes it easy to connect with participants. We take care of all the details—from feasibility checks, recruitment, reminders, confirmations, and admin.

Thanks to our four award-winning panel providers, we can tailor recruitment to every recruitment need, giving you access to a vast pool of high-quality participants from across 150+ countries.

  • User Interviews: Rated the #1 top-rated panel software on G2, fully dedicated to quality user research
  • PureSpectrum: Recognized as the Market Research Supplier of the Year
  • Respondent: Ensures a consistent 95% participants show-up rate
  • Cint: Winner of the Data Quality Award, 2024

And this is just the beginning—our network will continue to grow, offering even greater targeting capabilities and expanded reach in the future.

How does it work?

All you need to do is provide your participant criteria and our team will handle the rest! We’ll select the best panel for your needs and ensure everything in your study is set up perfectly so you can sit back and watch the results flow in. 

Ready to dive in?

To get started, head over to the Recruit tab under an Optimal study.

Need more info? Find out more about getting started or reach out to Support or your account team for more details.

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