November 3, 2024
1 min read

Unlocking UX excellence: Practical use cases for Optimal's research platform

In today's digital landscape, delivering exceptional user experiences is no longer optional—it's essential for success. At Optimal, we're committed to empowering UX professionals and organizations with the best-in-class tools and methodologies to create outstanding digital products and experiences. 

In this blog post, we'll explore practical use cases that demonstrate how Optimal's research platform can drive meaningful improvements across various UX scenarios.

Use case 1: Make Collaborative Design Decisions or A/B Test a Design

Whether you're refining an existing product, launching a new website, or rebranding, Optimal's user research and insights platform empowers your team to make informed, collaborative design decisions. Here's how to leverage our tools for impactful results:

1. Qualitative Insights: Establish organizational priorities

  • Use our Qualitative Research tool to develop a comprehensive list of top tasks or goals from your organization's perspective.
  • Engage stakeholders across departments to ensure alignment on key objectives.

2. Surveys: Validate user priorities and pain points

  • Deploy a targeted survey using our Survey tool to confirm users' top tasks and identify existing issues.
  • Gather quantitative data to support or challenge organizational assumptions about user needs.

3. First-click Testing: Conduct preference testing

  • Use our First-Click Testing tool to evaluate the effectiveness of different design options.
  • This method provides valuable insights for A/B testing decisions, ensuring designs resonate with your target audience.

4. Qualitative Insights: Deep dive into user preferences

  • Conduct follow-up interviews or focus groups using our Qualitative Research tool to gain a deeper understanding of user preferences and experiences with different design options.
  • Explore the 'why' behind user choices to inform more nuanced design decisions.

By systematically applying these research methods, your team can collaboratively create designs that not only look great but also deliver exceptional user experiences. Optimal's platform empowers you to make data-driven design decisions, fostering innovation while minimizing the risk of costly missteps.

Remember, the key to successful collaborative design is continuous iteration and testing. Use Optimal's tools throughout your design process to validate decisions, gather feedback, and refine your approach for optimal results.

Use case 2: Developing effective content strategies

Developing a robust content strategy is crucial for intranets, help documents, websites, and product copy. Optimal's user research and insights platform empowers you to create content that resonates with your audience and drives engagement. Here's how to leverage our tools for effective content strategy development:

1. Card Sorting: Organize content intuitively

  • Use our Card Sorting tool to understand how users naturally categorize and group your content.
  • Gain insights into users' mental models to inform your content hierarchy and organization.
  • Apply findings to create a content structure that aligns with user expectations, enhancing findability and engagement.

2. Tree Testing: Validate information architecture

  • Employ our Tree Testing tool to confirm whether information placed within your proposed hierarchy is findable and understandable.
  • Identify areas where users struggle to locate content, enabling you to refine your structure for optimal user experience.
  • Iterate on your information architecture based on concrete user data, ensuring your content is easily accessible.
  • Test different content structures and then compare them with each other using the task comparison tool available in Optimal to understand which structure is most likely to drive users to perform the targeted actions.

3. Qualitative Insights: Analyze language perceptions

  • Leverage our Qualitative Research tool to conduct in-depth interviews or focus groups.
  • Explore user perceptions of terminology, language style, and content tone.
  • Gather rich insights to inform your content voice and style guide, ensuring your messaging resonates with your target audience.

4. Additional Applications of Qualitative Insights

   Expand your content strategy research by using our Qualitative Research tool to:

  • Review internal tools and processes to streamline content creation workflows.
  • Compare content experiences across desktop and mobile devices for consistency.
  • Gather event feedback to inform content for future marketing materials.
  • Analyze customer service and support interactions to identify common issues and FAQs.
  • Conduct usability testing on existing content to identify areas for improvement.

   Key questions to explore:

  • What's working well in your current content?
  • What's not resonating with users?
  • What are users' first impressions of your content?
  • How do users typically interact with your content?
  • How well does your content foster empathy and connection with your audience?

By systematically applying these research methods, you'll develop a content strategy that not only meets your organizational goals but also deeply resonates with your audience. Optimal's platform empowers you to create content that informs, engages, and converts, driving meaningful results for your business.

Remember, content strategy is an ongoing process. Regularly use Optimal's tools to assess the effectiveness of your content, gather user feedback, and iteratively improve your approach for continued success.

Use case 3: Increase website traffic

Empower your team to boost conversion rates by leveraging Optimal's best-in-class user research and insights platform. Here's how you can unlock meaningful improvements:

1. Qualitative Insights & Surveys: Uncover user motivations

  • Conduct in-depth interviews or targeted surveys to gather rich, qualitative feedback about user experiences, motivations, and pain points on your site.
  • Add an intercept snippet to your existing website to survey users as they come to your website to get a clear understanding of user motivations in context.
  • Analyze responses to identify key themes and opportunities for optimization.

2. Tree Testing: Optimize navigation structure

  • Use our Tree Testing tool to evaluate the effectiveness of your site's navigation structure.
  • Identify areas where users struggle to find information, enabling you to streamline pathways to conversion.

3. Card Sorting: Enhance information architecture

  • Leverage our Card Sorting tool to understand how users naturally categorize your site's information.
  • Apply insights to refine the layout of product features or benefits on your landing pages, aligning with user expectations.

4. Prototype Testing: Validate Design Changes

  • Develop prototypes of new landing pages or key conversion elements (like CTAs) using our Prototype Testing tool.
  • Conduct first-click tests to ensure your design changes resonate with users and drive desired actions.

5. Follow-up Qualitative Insights: Iterate and improve

  • After implementing changes, conduct follow-up interviews or surveys to gauge the impact of your optimizations.
  • Gather feedback on the improved user experience and identify any remaining pain points.

By systematically applying these research methods, you'll gain the actionable insights needed to create a more intuitive, engaging, and conversion-friendly website. Optimal empowers you to make data-driven decisions that not only boost conversions but also enhance overall user satisfaction.

Embracing mixed methods research

To truly unlock the power of user research, we recommend a mixed methods approach. By combining quantitative data from surveys and usability tests with qualitative insights from interviews and open-ended responses, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your users' needs and behaviors.

For more information on mixed methods research and how it can enhance your UX strategy, check out our detailed guide: What is mixed methods research?

And that’s a wrap

Optimal's user research and insights platform provides the tools and methodologies you need to deliver exceptional digital experiences. By leveraging these use cases and adopting a mixed methods approach, you can make data-driven decisions that resonate with your users and drive business success.

Remember, great UX is an ongoing journey. Regularly employ these research methods to stay attuned to your users' evolving needs and preferences. With Optimal as your partner, you're equipped to create digital products and experiences that truly stand out in today's competitive landscape.

Ready to elevate your UX research? Explore Optimal's platform and start unlocking actionable insights today!

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Get Reliable Survey Results Fast: AI-Powered Question Simplification

At Optimal, we believe in the transformative potential of AI to accelerate your workflow and time to insights. Our goal is simple: keep humans at the heart of every insight while using AI as a powerful partner to amplify your expertise. 

By automating repetitive tasks, providing suggestions for your studies, and streamlining workflows, AI frees you up to focus on what matters most—delivering impact, making strategic decisions, and building products people love.

That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest AI feature: AI-Powered Question Simplification. 

Simplify and Refine Your Questions Instantly

Ambiguous or overly complex wording can confuse respondents, making it harder to get reliable, accurate insights. Plus, refining survey and question language is manual and can be a time-consuming process with little guidance. To solve this, we built an AI-powered tool to help study creators craft questions that resonate with participants and speed up the process of designing studies.

Our new AI-powered feature helps with:

  • Instant Suggestions: Simplify complex question wording and improve clarity to make your questions easier to understand.
  • Seamless Editing: Accept, reject, or regenerate suggestions with just a click, giving you complete control.
  • Better Insights: By refining your questions, you’ll gather more accurate responses, leading to higher-quality data that drives better decisions.

Apply AI-Powered Question Simplification to any of your survey questions or to screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions in prototype tests, surveys, card sorts, tree tests, and first-click tests.

AI: Your Research Partner, Not a Replacement


AI is at the forefront of our innovation at Optimal this year, and we’re building AI into Optimal with clear principles in mind:

  1. AI does the tedious work: It takes on repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing you to focus on insights and strategy.
  2. AI assists, not dictates: You can adapt, change, or ignore AI suggestions entirely.
  3. AI is a choice: We recognize that Optimal users have diverse needs and risk appetites. You remain in control of how, when, and if you use AI.

A Growing Suite of AI-Powered Tools


The introduction of Question Simplification is just one example of how we’re leveraging AI to make research more efficient and effective for people who do research.

In 2024, we launched our AI Insights within our Qualitative Insights tool, summarizing key takeaways from interviews and transcripts. Now, we’re diving even deeper, exploring more ways to use AI to make research more efficient and effective.

Ready to Get Started? 


Keep an eye out for more updates throughout 2025 as we continue to expand our platform with AI-powered features that help you uncover insights with speed, clarity, and more confidence.

Want to see how AI can speed up your workflow?

Apply AI-Powered Question Simplification today or check out AI Insights to experience it for yourself!

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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

Efficient Research: Maximizing the ROI of Understanding Your Customers

Introduction

User research is invaluable, but in fast-paced environments, researchers often struggle with tight deadlines, limited resources, and the need to prove their impact. In our recent UX Insider webinar, Weidan Li, Senior UX Researcher at Seek, shared insights on Efficient Research—an approach that optimizes Speed, Quality, and Impact to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of understanding customers.

At the heart of this approach is the Efficient Research Framework, which balances these three critical factors:

  • Speed – Conducting research quickly without sacrificing key insights.
  • Quality – Ensuring rigor and reliability in findings.
  • Impact – Making sure research leads to meaningful business and product changes.

Within this framework, Weidan outlined nine tactics that help UX researchers work more effectively. Let’s dive in.

1. Time Allocation: Invest in What Matters Most

Not all research requires the same level of depth. Efficient researchers prioritize their time by categorizing projects based on urgency and impact:

  • High-stakes decisions (e.g., launching a new product) require deep research.
  • Routine optimizations (e.g., tweaking UI elements) can rely on quick testing methods.
  • Low-impact changes may not need research at all.

By allocating time wisely, researchers can avoid spending weeks on minor issues while ensuring critical decisions are well-informed.

2. Assistance of AI: Let Technology Handle the Heavy Lifting

AI is transforming UX research, enabling faster and more scalable insights. Weidan suggests using AI to:

  • Automate data analysis – AI can quickly analyze survey responses, transcripts, and usability test results.
  • Generate research summaries – Tools like ChatGPT can help synthesize findings into digestible insights.
  • Speed up recruitment – AI-powered platforms can help find and screen participants efficiently.

While AI can’t replace human judgment, it can free up researchers to focus on higher-value tasks like interpreting results and influencing strategy.

3. Collaboration: Make Research a Team Sport

Research has a greater impact when it’s embedded into the product development process. Weidan emphasizes:

  • Co-creating research plans with designers, PMs, and engineers to align on priorities.
  • Involving stakeholders in synthesis sessions so insights don’t sit in a report.
  • Encouraging non-researchers to run lightweight studies, such as A/B tests or quick usability checks.

When research is shared and collaborative, it leads to faster adoption of insights and stronger decision-making.

4. Prioritization: Focus on the Right Questions

With limited resources, researchers must choose their battles wisely. Weidan recommends using a prioritization framework to assess:

  • Business impact – Will this research influence a high-stakes decision?
  • User impact – Does it address a major pain point?
  • Feasibility – Can we conduct this research quickly and effectively?

By filtering out low-priority projects, researchers can avoid research for research’s sake and focus on what truly drives change.

5. Depth of Understanding: Go Beyond Surface-Level Insights

Speed is important, but efficient research isn’t about cutting corners. Weidan stresses that even quick studies should provide a deep understanding of users by:

  • Asking why, not just what – Observing behavior is useful, but uncovering motivations is key.
  • Using triangulation – Combining methods (e.g., usability tests + surveys) to validate findings.
  • Revisiting past research – Leveraging existing insights instead of starting from scratch.

Balancing speed with depth ensures research is not just fast, but meaningful.

6. Anticipation: Stay Ahead of Research Needs

Proactive researchers don’t wait for stakeholders to request studies—they anticipate needs and set up research ahead of time. This means:

  • Building a research roadmap that aligns with upcoming product decisions.
  • Running continuous discovery research so teams have a backlog of insights to pull from.
  • Creating self-serve research repositories where teams can find relevant past studies.

By anticipating research needs, UX teams can reduce last-minute requests and deliver insights exactly when they’re needed.

7. Justification of Methodology: Explain Why Your Approach Works

Stakeholders may question research methods, especially when they seem time-consuming or expensive. Weidan highlights the importance of educating teams on why specific methods are used:

  • Clearly explain why qualitative research is needed when stakeholders push for just numbers.
  • Show real-world examples of how past research has led to business success.
  • Provide a trade-off analysis (e.g., “This method is faster but provides less depth”) to help teams make informed choices.

A well-justified approach ensures research is respected and acted upon.

8. Individual Engagement: Tailor Research Communication to Your Audience

Not all stakeholders consume research the same way. Weidan recommends adapting insights to fit different audiences:

  • Executives – Focus on high-level impact and key takeaways.
  • Product teams – Provide actionable recommendations tied to specific features.
  • Designers & Engineers – Share usability findings with video clips or screenshots.

By delivering insights in the right format, researchers increase the likelihood of stakeholder buy-in and action.

9. Business Actions: Ensure Research Leads to Real Change

The ultimate goal of research is not just understanding users—but driving business decisions. To ensure research leads to action:

  • Follow up on implementation – Track whether teams apply the insights.
  • Tie findings to key metrics – Show how research affects conversion rates, retention, or engagement.
  • Advocate for iterative research – Encourage teams to re-test and refine based on new data.

Research is most valuable when it translates into real business outcomes.

Final Thoughts: Research That Moves the Needle

Efficient research is not just about doing more, faster—it’s about balancing speed, quality, and impact to maximize its influence. Weidan’s nine tactics help UX researchers work smarter by:


✔️  Prioritizing high-impact work
✔️  Leveraging AI and collaboration
✔️  Communicating research in a way that drives action

By adopting these strategies, UX teams can ensure their research is not just insightful, but transformational.

Watch the full webinar here

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