February 14, 2024
2 min

Product Roadmap Update

At Optimal Workshop, we're dedicated to building the best user research platform to empower you with the tools to better understand your customers and create intuitive digital experiences. We're thrilled to announce some game-changing updates and new products that are on the horizon to help elevate the way you gather insights and keep customers at the heart of everything you do. 

What’s new…

Integration with Figma 🚀

Last month, we joined forces with design powerhouse Figma to launch our integration. You can import images from Figma into Chalkmark (our click-testing tool) in just a few clicks, streamlining your workflows and getting insights to make decisions based on data not hunches and opinions.  

What’s coming next…

Session Replays 🧑‍💻

With session replay you can focus on other tasks while Optimal Workshop automatically captures card sort sessions for you to watch in your own time.  Gain valuable insights into how participants engage and interpret a card sort without the hassle of running moderated sessions. The first iteration of session replays captures the study interactions, and will not include audio or face recording, but this is something we are exploring for future iterations. Session replays will be available in tree testing and click-testing later in 2024.  

Reframer Transcripts 🔍

Say goodbye to juggling note-taking and hello to more efficient ways of working with Transcripts! We're continuing to add more capability to Reframer, our qualitative research tool, to now include the importing of interview transcripts. Save time, reduce human errors and oversights by importing transcripts, tagging and analyzing observations all within Reframer. We’re committed to build on transcripts with video and audio transcription capability in the future,  we’ll keep you in the loop and when to expect those releases. 

Prototype testing 🧪

The team is fizzing to be working on a new Prototype testing product designed to expand your research methods and help test prototypes easily from the Optimal Workshop platform. Testing prototypes early and often is an important step in the design process, saving you time and money before you invest too heavily in the build. We are working with customers and on delivering the first iteration of this exciting new product. Stay tuned for Prototypes coming in the second quarter of 2024.   

Workspaces 🎉

Making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on projects is a big focus for 2024. Workspaces are the first step towards empowering organizations to better manage multiple teams with projects. Projects will allow greater flexibility on who can see what, encouraging working in the open and collaboration alongside the ability to make projects private. The privacy feature is available on Enterprise plans.

Questions upgrade❓

Our survey product Questions is in for a glow up in 2024 💅. The team are enjoying working with customers, collecting and reviewing feedback on how to improve Questions and will be sharing more on this in the coming months. 

Help us build a better Optimal Workshop

We are looking for new customers to join our research panel to help influence product development. From time to time, you’ll be invited to join us for interviews or surveys, and you’ll be rewarded for your time with a thank-you gift.  If you’d like to join the team, email product@optimalworkshop.com

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1 min read

Bear Liu: How visual thinking can improve communications in design workplaces

When Bear Liu was teaching himself design, he struggled remembering concepts since English wasn’t his first language. To help, he started doodling. By drawing pictures that related to what he was learning, he found he could not only remember them better, he could understand and communicate more effectively too. Ever since, he’s used the power of drawings and pictures to relay information in ways people can use.

Bear gives examples of how visual communication can help design workplaces to relay information in a more memorable and usable way. It may only seem like a minor change, but the difference can be significant.

Bear’s background 🎤

Bear Liu is a Product Designer at Xero, an online accounting platform that’s used all over the world. He’s also a Design Mentor at Springboard and CareerFoundry, and an Apple Award-Winning podcast host at BearTalk.

His background is in science education. As a self-taught designer, Bear has helped a raft of large and small businesses with digital products over the last 16 years. His clients come from diverse backgrounds and industries across the globe. Bear's professional passions also carry over into his hobbies. Outside of work he enjoys reading, drawing, and producing videos & podcasts on tech and design.

Contact Details:

You can find Bear on LinkedIn, or listen to his podcast, BearTalk.

Unleash your visual superpower as a communication pro 🦸🏻

When it comes to addressing business challenges it is important to keep these three aspects in mind: 

  1. Understanding - break down complex problems and solutions so everyone can understand. 
  2. Memory - retaining information in your mind is difficult even with note taking.
  3. Communication- People relate to words differently, and the meaning of something can easily get lost in translation. This issue is more prevalent with remote work.

Bear Liu strongly believes that visual communication helps people understand, remember and communicate information more effectively. Why?

  • It helps to focus. Pictures remove distractions and draw attention to where it’s desired.
  • It’s a token. A picture is universal - a house or a smiley face means the same thing to people that speak different languages. 
  • Most people are visual thinkers. Studies have found humans are hard-wired to process visual information faster. We are better at storing information in images, rather than numbers and letters.

But what if I can’t draw? This is a common issue Bear finds when talking to people about this. It’s not about the quality of the drawing itself, it’s about what it means. By delivering a message through a picture, it becomes understandable. Many of Bear’s drawings only ever remain in draft form. Even simple doodles can have meanings that make concepts clear.

In his design work at Xero, Bear has used drawing and sketches to great effect in a range of instances:

  • The accessibility tree was a complex, abstract system, but by drawing it (on a literal tree), and adding a few notes alongside it, the terminology became much more understandable.
  • Sketching how customers work made it easier to describe how Xero could help them. It was much more memorable than writing it out in paragraphs.
  • Wrapping the year in product design. A written summary of a year’s work is long-winded. Instead, Bear drew a tree and pinned key words, quotes and achievements to communicate the highlights.
  • UX terminology explanations can be difficult for those outside the industry to comprehend. Bear challenged himself to share 1 minute videos that accompanied simple drawings to help colleagues understand them, and had rave reviews.
  • Sketching notes is a great alternative to writing notes at conferences or meetings. Presenters can draw to help audiences follow along, and people in the audience themselves can also sketch their own notes.

Why it matters  🔥

Bear has adapted visual thinking to his own product design process and has seen a noticeable improvement in communication as a result.

People are busy - their brains are packed with all sorts of information, and they’re easily distracted by other things they have on their minds. By delivering information in a way that helps them to focus on it, remember and understand it, designers can achieve their ultimate goals.

As Bear also notes, drawing is fun. It’s much more rewarding than using words, as well as much more effective.

Bear used the example of his talk at UX New Zealand 2023 as a great place to use a drawing. Rather than follow along with his message by scribbling notes the whole way through, those in the audience could capture the biggest lessons easily in one simple drawing.

  • First, Bear drew one stick figure to represent himself as a speaker. He drew three speech bubbles, where audience members could write the most notable points he said.
  • Then he drew another stick figure, which represented the audience member listening to him. They had three thought bubbles, which people could populate with their biggest takeaways from the speech.

That one simple drawing is a template that can be used in any speech or meeting to remember the key points.

Learn more
1 min read

Meera Pankhania: From funding to delivery - Ensuring alignment from start to finish

It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand, you need to submit a business case and, as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand, you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way. 

Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?

Meera Pankhania, Design Director and Co-founder of Propel Design, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on traceability and her learnings from delivering a $300 million Government program.

In her talk, Meera helps us understand how to use service traceability techniques in our work and apply them to any environment - ensuring we design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model.

Background on Meera Pankhania

As a design leader, Meera is all about working on complex, purpose-driven challenges. She helps organizations take a human-centric approach to service transformation and helps deliver impactful, pragmatic outcomes while building capability and leading teams through growth and change.

Meera co-founded Propel Design, a strategic research, design, and delivery consultancy in late 2020. She has 15 years of experience in service design, inclusive design, and product management across the private, non-profit, and public sectors in both the UK and Australia. 

Meera is particularly interested in policy and social design. After a stint in the Australian Public Service, Meera was appointed as a senior policy adviser to the NSW Minister for Customer Service, Hon. Victor Dominello MP. In this role, she played a part in NSW’s response to the COVID pandemic, flexing her design leadership skills in a new, challenging, and important context.

Contact Details:

Email address: meera@propeldesign.com.au

Find Meera on LinkedIn  

From funding to delivery: ensuring alignment from start to finish 🏁🎉👏

Meera’s talk explores a fascinating case study within the Department of Employment Services (Australia) where a substantial funding investment of around $300 million set the stage for a transformative journey. This funding supported the delivery of a revamped Employment Services Model, which had the goal of delivering better services to job seekers and employers, and a better system for providers within this system. The project had a focus on aligning teams prior to delivery, which resulted in a huge amount of groundwork for Meera.

Her journey involved engaging various stakeholders within the department, including executives, to understand the program as a whole and what exactly needed to be delivered. “Traceability” became the watchword for this project, which is laid out in three phases.

  • Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables
  • Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness
  • Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices

Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables 🧮

Research and discovery (pre-delivery)

Meera’s work initially meant conducting extensive research and engagement with executives, product managers, researchers, designers, and policymakers. Through this process, a common theme was identified – the urgent (and perhaps misguided) need to start delivering! Often, organizations focus on obtaining funding without adequately understanding the complexities involved in delivering the right services to the right users, leading to half-baked delivery.

After this initial research, some general themes started to emerge:

  1. Assumptions were made that still needed validation
  2. Teams weren’t entirely sure that they understood the user’s needs
  3. A lack of holistic understanding of how much research and design was needed

The conclusion of this phase was that “what” needed to be delivered wasn’t clearly defined. The same was true for “how” it would be delivered.

Traceability

Meera’s journey heavily revolved around the concept of "traceability” and sought to ensure that every step taken within the department was aligned with the ultimate goal of improving employment services. Traceability meant having a clear origin and development path for every decision and action taken. This is particularly important when spending taxpayer dollars!

So, over the course of eight weeks (which turned out to be much longer), the team went through a process of combing through documents in an effort to bring everything together to make sense of the program as a whole. This involved some planning, user journey mapping, and testing and refinement. 

Documenting Key Artifacts

Numerous artifacts and documents played a crucial role in shaping decisions. Meera and her team gathered and organized these artifacts, including policy requirements, legislation, business cases, product and program roadmaps, service maps, and blueprints. The team also included prior research insights and vision documents which helped to shape a holistic view of the required output.

After an effort of combing through the program documents and laying everything out, it became clear that there were a lot of gaps and a LOT to do.

Prioritising tasks

As a result of these gaps, a process of task prioritization was necessary. Tasks were categorized based on a series of factors and then mapped out based on things like user touch points, pain points, features, business policy, and technical capabilities.

This then enabled Meera and the team to create Product Summary Tiles. These tiles meant that each product team had its own summary ahead of a series of planning sessions. It gave them as much context (provided by the traceability exercise) as possible to help with planning. Essentially, these tiles provided teams with a comprehensive overview of their projects i.e. what their user needs, what certain policies require them to deliver, etc.  

Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness 🙌🏻

Meera wanted every team to feel confident that we weren’t doing too much or too little in order to design and build the right service, the right way.

Standard design and research check-ins were well adopted, which was a great start, but Meera and the team also built a Delivery Readiness Tool. It was used to assess a team's readiness to move forward with a project. This tool includes questions related to the development phase, user research, alignment with the business case, consideration of policy requirements, and more. Ultimately, it ensures that teams have considered all necessary factors before progressing further. 

Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices 🍃

As the program progressed, several sustainable work practices emerged which Government executives were keen to retain going forward.

Some of these included:

  • ResearchOps Practice: The team established a research operations practice, streamlining research efforts and ensuring that ongoing research was conducted efficiently and effectively.
  • Consistent Design Artifacts: Templates and consistent design artifacts were created, reducing friction and ensuring that teams going forward started from a common baseline.
  • Design Authority and Ways of Working: A design authority was established to elevate and share best practices across the program.
  • Centralized and Decentralized Team Models: The program showcased the effectiveness of a combination of centralized and decentralized team models. A central design team provided guidance and support, while service design leads within specific service lines ensured alignment and consistency.

Why it matters 🔥

Meera's journey serves as a valuable resource for those working on complex design programs, emphasizing the significance of aligning diverse stakeholders and maintaining traceability. Alignment and traceability are critical to ensuring that programs never lose sight of the problem they’re trying to solve, both from the user and organization’s perspective. They’re also critical to delivering on time and within budget!

Traceability key takeaways 🥡

  • Early Alignment Matters: While early alignment is ideal, it's never too late to embark on a traceability journey. It can uncover gaps, increase confidence in decision-making, and ensure that the right services are delivered.
  • Identify and audit: You never know what artifacts will shape your journey. Identify everything early, and don’t be afraid to get clarity on things you’re not sure about.
  • Conducting traceability is always worthwhile: Even if you don’t find many gaps in your program, you will at least gain a high level of confidence that your delivery is focused on the right things.

Delivery readiness key takeaways 🥡

  • Skills Mix is Vital: Assess and adapt team member roles to match their skills and experiences, ensuring they are positioned optimally.
  • Not Everyone Shares the Same Passion: Recognize that not everyone will share the same level of passion for design and research. Make the relevance of these practices clear to all team members.

Sustainability key takeaways 🥡

  • One Size Doesn't Fit All: Tailor methodologies, templates, and practices to the specific needs of your organization.
  • Collaboration is Key: Foster a sense of community and collective responsibility within teams, encouraging shared ownership of project outcomes.

Learn more
1 min read

Product Roadmap Update

At Optimal Workshop, we're dedicated to building the best user research platform to empower you with the tools to better understand your customers and create intuitive digital experiences. We're thrilled to announce some game-changing updates and new products that are on the horizon to help elevate the way you gather insights and keep customers at the heart of everything you do. 

What’s new…

Integration with Figma 🚀

Last month, we joined forces with design powerhouse Figma to launch our integration. You can import images from Figma into Chalkmark (our click-testing tool) in just a few clicks, streamlining your workflows and getting insights to make decisions based on data not hunches and opinions.  

What’s coming next…

Session Replays 🧑‍💻

With session replay you can focus on other tasks while Optimal Workshop automatically captures card sort sessions for you to watch in your own time.  Gain valuable insights into how participants engage and interpret a card sort without the hassle of running moderated sessions. The first iteration of session replays captures the study interactions, and will not include audio or face recording, but this is something we are exploring for future iterations. Session replays will be available in tree testing and click-testing later in 2024.  

Reframer Transcripts 🔍

Say goodbye to juggling note-taking and hello to more efficient ways of working with Transcripts! We're continuing to add more capability to Reframer, our qualitative research tool, to now include the importing of interview transcripts. Save time, reduce human errors and oversights by importing transcripts, tagging and analyzing observations all within Reframer. We’re committed to build on transcripts with video and audio transcription capability in the future,  we’ll keep you in the loop and when to expect those releases. 

Prototype testing 🧪

The team is fizzing to be working on a new Prototype testing product designed to expand your research methods and help test prototypes easily from the Optimal Workshop platform. Testing prototypes early and often is an important step in the design process, saving you time and money before you invest too heavily in the build. We are working with customers and on delivering the first iteration of this exciting new product. Stay tuned for Prototypes coming in the second quarter of 2024.   

Workspaces 🎉

Making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on projects is a big focus for 2024. Workspaces are the first step towards empowering organizations to better manage multiple teams with projects. Projects will allow greater flexibility on who can see what, encouraging working in the open and collaboration alongside the ability to make projects private. The privacy feature is available on Enterprise plans.

Questions upgrade❓

Our survey product Questions is in for a glow up in 2024 💅. The team are enjoying working with customers, collecting and reviewing feedback on how to improve Questions and will be sharing more on this in the coming months. 

Help us build a better Optimal Workshop

We are looking for new customers to join our research panel to help influence product development. From time to time, you’ll be invited to join us for interviews or surveys, and you’ll be rewarded for your time with a thank-you gift.  If you’d like to join the team, email product@optimalworkshop.com

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