November 3, 2024
3 min

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!

Share this article
Author
Optimal
Workshop
Topics

Related articles

View all blog articles
Learn more
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!

Learn more
1 min read

Clara Kliman-Silver: AI & design: imagining the future of UX

In the last few years, the influence of AI has steadily been expanding into various aspects of design. In early 2023, that expansion exploded. AI tools and features are now everywhere, and there are two ways designers commonly react to it:

  • With enthusiasm for how they can use it to make their jobs easier
  • With skepticism over how reliable it is, or even fear that it could replace their jobs

Google UX researcher Clara Kliman-Silver is at the forefront of researching and understanding the potential impact of AI on design into the future. This is a hot topic that’s on the radar of many designers as they grapple with what the new normal is, and how it will change things in the coming years.

Clara’s background 

Clara Kliman-Silver spends her time studying design teams and systems, UX tools and designer-developer collaboration. She’s a specialist in participatory design and uses generative methods to investigate workflows, understand designer-developer experiences, and imagine ways to create UIs. In this work, Clara looks at how technology can be leveraged to help people make things, and do it more efficiently than they currently are.

In today’s context, that puts generative AI and machine learning right in her line of sight. The way this technology has boomed in recent times has many people scrambling to catch up - to identify the biggest opportunities and to understand the risks that come with it. Clara is a leader in assessing the implications of AI. She analyzes both the technology itself and the way people feel about it to forecast what it will mean into the future.

Contact Details:

You can find Clara in LinkedIn or on Twitter @cklimansilver

What role should artificial intelligence play in UX design process? 🤔

Clara’s expertise in understanding the role of AI in design comes from significant research and analysis of how the technology is being used currently and how industry experts feel about it. AI is everywhere in today’s world, from home devices to tech platforms and specific tools for various industries. In many cases, AI automation is used for productivity, where it can speed up processes with subtle, easy to use applications.

As mentioned above, the transformational capabilities of AI are met with equal parts of enthusiasm and skepticism. The way people use AI, and how they feel about it is important, because users need to be comfortable implementing the technology in order for it to make a difference. The question of what value AI brings to the design process is ongoing. On one hand, AI can help increase efficiency for systems and processes. On the other hand, it can exacerbate problems if the user's intentions are misunderstood.

Access for all 🦾

There’s no doubt that AI tools enable novices to perform tasks that, in years gone by, required a high level of expertise. For example, film editing was previously a manual task, where people would literally cut rolls of film and splice them together on a reel. It was something only a trained editor could do. Now, anyone with a smartphone has access to iMovie or a similar app, and they can edit film in seconds.

For film experts, digital technology allows them to speed up tedious tasks and focus on more sophisticated aspects of their work. Clara hypothesizes that AI is particularly valuable when it automates mundane tasks. AI enables more individuals to leverage digital technologies without requiring specialist training. Thus, AI has shifted the landscape of what it means to be an “expert” in a field. Expertise is about more than being able to simply do something - it includes having the knowledge and experience to do it for an informed reason. 

Research and testing 🔬

Clara performs a lot of concept testing, which involves recognizing the perceived value of an approach or method. Concept testing helps in scenarios where a solution may not address a problem or where the real problem is difficult to identify. In a recent survey, Clara describes two predominant benefits designers experienced from AI:

  1. Efficiency. Not only does AI expedite the problem solving process, it can also help efficiently identify problems. 
  2. Innovation. Generative AI can innovate on its own, developing ideas that designers themselves may not have thought of.

The design partnership 🤝🏽

Overall, Clara says UX designers tend to see AI as a creative partner. However, most users don’t yet trust AI enough to give it complete agency over the work it’s used for. The level of trust designers have exists on a continuum, where it depends on the nature of the work and the context of what they’re aiming to accomplish. Other factors such as where the tech comes from, who curated it and who’s training the model also influences trust. For now, AI is largely seen as a valued tool, and there is cautious optimism and tentative acceptance for its application. 

Why it matters 💡

AI presents as potentially one of the biggest game-changers to how people work in our generation. Although AI has widespread applications across sectors and systems, there are still many questions about it. In the design world, systems like DALL-E allow people to create AI-generated imagery, and auto layout in various tools allows designers to iterate more quickly and efficiently.

Like many other industries, designers are wondering where AI might go in the future and what it might look like. The answer to these questions has very real implications for the future of design jobs and whether they will exist. In practice, Clara describes the current mood towards AI as existing on a continuum between adherence and innovation:

  • Adherence is about how AI helps designers follow best practice
  • Innovation is at the other end of the spectrum, and involves using AI to figure out what’s possible

The current environment is extremely subjective, and there’s no agreed best practice. This makes it difficult to recommend a certain approach to adopting AI and creating permanent systems around it. Both the technology and the sentiment around it will evolve through time, and it’s something designers, like all people, will need to maintain good awareness of.

Learn more
1 min read

Optimal vs. UserTesting: A Modern, Streamlined Platform or a Complex Enterprise Suite

The user research landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, but not all platforms have adapted at the same pace. UserTesting for example, despite being one of the largest players in the market, still operates on legacy infrastructure with outdated pricing models that no longer meet the evolving needs of mature UX, design and product teams. More and more we see enterprises choosing platforms like Optimal, because we represent the next generation of user research and insight platforms:  ones that are purpose-built for modern teams that are prioritizing agility, insight quality, and value.

What are the biggest differences between Optimal and UserTesting?

Cost

  • UserTesting is Expensive: UserTesting charges $5,000-$10,000 per user annually plus additional session-based fees, creating unpredictable costs that escalate the more research your team does. This means that teams often face budget surprises when conducting longer studies or more frequent research.
  • Optimal has Transparent Pricing: Optimal offers flat-rate pricing without per-seat fees or session units, enabling teams to scale research sustainbly. Our transparent pricing eliminates budget surprises and enables predictable research ops planning.

Return on Investment

  • Justifying the Cost of UserTesting: UserTesting's high costs and complex pricing structure make it hard to prove the ROI, particularly for teams conducting frequent research or extended studies that trigger additional session fees.
  • The Best Value in the Market: Optimal's straightforward pricing and comprehensive feature set deliver measurable ROI. We offer 90% of the features that UserTesting provides at 10% of the price.

Technology Evolution

  • UserTesting is Struggling to Modernize: UserTesting's platform shows signs of aging infrastructure, with slower performance and difficulty integrating modern research methodologies. Their technology advancement has lagged behind industry innovation.
  • Optimal is Purpose-Built for Modern Research: Optimal has invested heavily over the last few years in features for contemporary research needs, including AI-powered analysis and automation capabilities.

UserZoom Integration Challenges

  • UserZoom Integration Challenges: UserTesting's acquisition of UserZoom has created platform challenges that continue to impact user experience. UserTesting customers report confusion navigating between legacy systems and inconsistent feature availability and quality.
  • Built by Researchers for Researchers: Optimal has built from the ground up a single, cohesive platform without the complexity of merged acquisitions, ensuring consistent user experience and seamless workflow integration.

Participant Panel Quality

  • Poor Quality, In-House Panel: UserTesting's massive scale has led to participant quality issues, with researchers reporting difficulty finding high-quality participants for specialized research needs and inconsistent participant engagement.
  • Flexibility = Quality: Optimal prioritizes flexibility for our users, allowing our customers to bring their own participants for free or use our high-quality panels, with over 100+ million verified participants across 150+ countries who meet strict quality standards.

Customer Support Experience

  • Impersonal, Enterprise Support: Users report that UserTesting's large organizational structure creates slower support cycles, outsourced customer service, and reduced responsiveness to individual customer needs.
  • Agile, Personal Support: At Optimal we pride ourselves on our fast, human support with dedicated account management and direct access to product teams, ensuring fast and personalized support.

The Future of User Research Platforms

The future of user research platforms is here, and smart teams are re-evaluating their platform needs to reflect that future state. What was once a fragmented landscape of basic testing tools and legacy systems has evolved into one where comprehensive user insight platforms are now the preferred solution. Today's UX, product and design teams need platforms that have evolved to include:

  • Advanced Analytics: AI-powered analysis that transforms data into actionable insights
  • Flexible Recruitment: Options for both BYO, panel and custom participant recruitment
  • Transparent Pricing: Predictable costs that scale with your needs
  • Responsive Development: Platforms that evolve based on user feedback and industry trends

Platforms Need to Evolve for Modern Research Needs

When selecting a vendor, teams need to choose a platform with the functionality that their teams need now but also one that will also grow with the needs of your team in the future. Scalable, adaptable platforms enable research teams to:

  • Scale Efficiently: Grow research activities without exponential cost increaeses
  • Embrace Innovation: Integrate new research methodologies and analysis techniques as well as emerging tools like AI 
  • Maintain Standards: Ensure consistent participant, data and tool quality as the platform evolves
  • Stay Responsive: Adapt to changing business needs and market conditions

The key is choosing a platform that continues to evolve rather than one constrained by outdated infrastructure and complex, legacy pricing models.

Ready to see how leading brands including Lego, Netflix and Nike achieve better research outcomes? Experience how Optimal's platform delivers user insights that adapt to your team's growing needs.

Seeing is believing

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