Accelerate Study Creation with the New Study Flow

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.

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Introducing the new Qualitative Insights 🔍

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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:

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

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Discover insights effortlessly 💡 

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

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• 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.

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How it works 🛠️ 

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Manual insight creation

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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.

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AI-Powered Insight Generation (Optional)

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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.

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AI: Your analysis assistant 🤖

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

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

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

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Your data, your choice 🔒 

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We prioritize your privacy and data control:

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• 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

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Get started today 🌟 

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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!

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:
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• 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.
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Drive Value with Video Recordings and Prototype Testing

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‍By combining video recordings with prototype testing, you can unlock actionable insights that make a real impact. 
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Here’s how they drive value for your initiatives:
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• 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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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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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!