November 19, 2024

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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Fast Track Your Studies: 15+ Ready-to-Use Templates to Accelerate Insights

Research just got a whole lot easier. 🚀 With over 15 brand-new templates added to our template library, Optimal is here to help you fast-track your studies and accelerate your time to insights.

Our mission? To make research accessible for everyone, whether you're in product, design, marketing, or research. With templates, finding the right study for your needs has never been simpler.

Fast Track Your Research

    • Hit the ground running: Get pre-built templates designed to help you quickly set up studies that deliver results.
    • Accelerate insights: From screening questions to tasks, we’ve done the heavy lifting so you can customize these templates quickly for your own use and focus on analyzing data to inform decisions.

    What’s Included in Each Template?


    ✔️ Clear study goals—know what you'll learn

    ✔️ Best practices for study setup

    ✔️ Sample screener questions to target the right participants

    ✔️ Ready-to-go task suggestions

    How to Use Them


    Preview: View the participant’s study experience.

    Customize: Clone the template and tailor it to your unique needs.

    Explore New Use Cases


    Our templates are designed to empower teams to tackle a range of challenges. Here are just a few examples from our library:

    • Optimize your website or app signup flows
    • Organize and label your content
    • A/B test email designs
    • Design a new website navigation
    • Run usability tests for apps
    • Conduct market research
    • Prioritize features
    • Define your brand tone of voice

    Find Templates Built for You


    Filter by role or use case to discover the perfect starting point for your next project or get inspired for new ideas.

    Start Researching Today


    Already an Optimal Workshop user? Head to the Templates section of your Dashboard and explore what’s new.

    Not yet onboard? Try Optimal Workshop free for 7 days to get started.

    Learn more
    1 min read

    2024: A Year of Transformation at Optimal Workshop

    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.

    Democratizing Research

    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.

    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. 

    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.

    Accelerating Insight Discovery

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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

    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.

    Expanding Platform Capabilities in 2025

    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!

    Learn more
    1 min read

    What do you prioritize when doing qualitative research?

    Qualitative user research is about exploration. Exploration is about the journey, not only the destination (or outcome). Gaining information and insights about your users through interviews, usability testing, contextual, observations and diary entries. Using these qualitative research methods to not only answer your direct queries, but to uncover and unravel your users ‘why’.

    It can be important to use qualitative research to really dig deep, get to know your users and get inside their heads, and their reasons. Creating intuitive and engaging products that deliver the best user experience. 

    What is qualitative research? 🔎

    The term ‘qualitative’ refers to things that cannot be measured numerically and qualitative user research is no exception. Qualitative research is primarily an exploratory research method that is typically done early in the design process and is useful for uncovering insights into people’s thoughts, opinions, and motivations. It allows us to gain a deeper understanding of problems and provides answers to questions we didn’t know we needed to ask. 

    Qualitative research could be considered the ‘why’. Where quantitative user research uncovers the how or the what users want. Qualitative user research will uncover why they make decisions (and possibly much more).

    Priorities ⚡⚡⚡⚡

    When undertaking user research it is great to do a mix of quantitative and qualitative research. Which will round out the numbers with human driven insights.

    Quantitative user research methods, such as card sorting or tree testing, will answer the ‘what’ your users want, and provide data to support this. These insights are number driven and are based on testing direct interaction with your product. This is super valuable to report to stakeholders. Hard data is difficult to argue what changes need to be made to how your information architecture (IA) is ordered, sorted or designed. To find out more about the quantitative research options, take a read.

    Qualitative user research, on the other hand, may uncover a deeper understanding of ‘why’ your users want the IA ordered, sorted or designed a certain way.  The devil is in the detail afterall and great user insights are discoverable. 

    Priorities for your qualitative research needs to be less about the numbers, and more on discovering your users ‘why’. Observing, listening, questioning and looking at reasons for users decisions will provide valuable insights for product design and ultimately improve user experience.

    Usability Testing - this research method is used to evaluate how easy and intuitive a product is to use.  Observing, noting and watching the participant complete tasks without interference or questions can uncover a lot of insights that data alone can’t give. This method can be done in a couple of ways, moderated or unmoderated. While it can be quicker to do unmoderated and easier to arrange, the deep insights will come out of moderated testing. 

    Observational - with this qualitative research method your insights will be uncovered from observing and noting what the participant is doing, paying particular attention to their non-verbal communication. Where do they demonstrate frustration, or turn away from the task, or change their approach? Factual note taking, meaning there shouldn’t be any opinions attached to what is being observed, is important to keep the insights unbiased.

    Contextual - paying attention to the context in which the interview or testing is done is important. Is it hot, loud, cold or is the screen of their laptop covered in post-its that make it difficult to see? Or do they struggle with navigating using the laptop tracker? All of this noted, in a factual manner, without personal inferring or added opinion based observations can give a window into why the participant struggled or was frustrated at any point.

    These research methods can be done as purely observational research (you don’t interview or converse with your participant) and noting how they interact (more interested in the process than the outcome of their product interaction). Or, these qualitative research methods can be coupled with an

    Interview - a series of questions asked around a particular task or product. Careful note taking around what the participant says as well as noting any observations. This method should allow a conversation to flow. Whilst the interviewer should be prepared with a list of questions around their topic, remain flexible enough to dig deeper where there might be details or insights of interest. An interviewer that is comfortable in getting to know their participants unpicks reservations and allows a flow of conversation, and generates amazing insights.

    With an interview it can be of use to have a second person in the room to act as the note taker. This can free up the interviewer to engage with the participant and unpick the insights.

    Using a great note taking side kick, like our Reframer, can take the pain out of recording all these juicy and deep insights. Time-stamping, audio or video recordings and notes all stored in one place. Easily accessed by the team, reviewed, reports generated and stored for later.

    Let’s consider 🤔

    You’re creating a new app to support your gym and it’s website. You’re looking to generate personal training bookings, allow members to book classes or have updates and personalise communication for your members. But before investing in final development it needs to be tested. How do your users interact with it? Why would they want to? Does it behave in a way that improves the user experience? Or does it simply not deliver? But why?

    First off, using quantitative research like Chalkmark would show how the interface is working. Where are users clicking, where do they go after that. Is it simple to use? You now have direct data that supports your questions, or possibly suggests a change of design to support quicker task completion, or further engagement.

    While all of this is great data for the design, does it dig deep enough to really get an understanding of why your users are frustrated? Do they find what they need quickly? Or get completely lost? Finding out these insights and improving on them can make the most of your users’ experience.

    When quantitative research is coupled with robust qualitative research that prioritizes an in-depth understanding of what your users need, ultimately the app can make the most of your users’ experience.

    Using moderated usability testing for your gym app, observations can be made about how the participant interacts with the interface. Where do they struggle, get lost, or where do they complete a task quickly and simply. This type of research enhances the quantitative data and gives insight into where and why the app is or isn't performing.

    Then interviewing participants about why they make decisions on the app, how they use it and why they would use it. These focussed questions, with some free flow conversation will round out your research. Giving valuable insights that can be reviewed, analyzed and reported to the product team and key stakeholders. Focussing the outcome, and designing a product that delivers on not just what users need, but in-depth understand of why. 

    Wrap Up 🥙

    Quantitative and qualitative user research do work hand in hand, each offering a side to the same coin. Hard number driven data with quantitative user research will deliver the what needs to be addressed. With focussed quantitative research it is possible to really get a handle on why your users interact with your product in a certain way, and how. 

    The Optimal Workshop platform has all the tools, research methods and even the note taking tools you need to get started with your user research, now, not next week! See you soon.

    Seeing is believing

    Explore our tools and see how Optimal makes gathering insights simple, powerful, and impactful.