We’re excited to share some new features and product updates that we've rolled out lately and what’s coming up next.

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What's new…

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Speeding up task analysis in Treejack 🚤

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Customer feedback and research have shown that users analyse results in Treejack in a task-by-task manner. To better support this way of working, we’ve updated Treejack results to ensure the success and directness of each task are easier to compare with the new Task overview tab in Results.  This new visualisation is available in Results > Overview> Task overview section in Optimal Workshop.

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Aggregate path views 

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We have also introduced the aggregate paths view in the Paths tab (it used to only be visible via the compare tasks button). This allows users to more easily see what the popular paths are for each task and how much each successful path was used (or not). 

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Over the next few months, we’ll continue working through our results tabs to update them to a task-by-task view and highlight insights at a task level. 

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Improving the quality of participant recruitment

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We’re continuing work to improve the quality of participants recruited in Optimal Workshop. Our latest release involves eliminating all participants that rush through a Treejack study.  We’ve analysed years of participants to get a good idea of what ‘rushing’ means, and we can now identify these ‘speeders’ and remove them from our participant pools. We have also removed the limit in-app for replacement participants across all study types, and released updates to immediately eliminate poor quality participants from custom orders. 

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Help guide: How to replace study participants in-app

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What’s next:

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• Identifying participants that rush through other tools and remove from participant pools.
• Build more automated flagging and behaviours to eliminate other behaviours that indicate poor-quality participants.
• Continued monitoring and analysis to ensure high participant quality.

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Templates are here 🙌 

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We are excited to announce our first six project templates are now available. Templates have been created with industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and back your results to make data-driven decisions.   These ready-made templates give you a headstart on your research by providing you with the right range of study types and when to use them. 

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Where will they live?

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Templates are accessible in the app from the Dashboard > Browse Templates. From the ‘templates menu’ select a template that matches your use case for example ‘I need to organise content into categories’ and get going faster than before. You can edit and customise the templates to suit your research goals. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of our template journey and while we continue to build up our collection we’d love your input too. If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from we’d love to hear from you. Email us at product@optimalworkshop.com.

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What’s coming up…

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Optimal Academy 🎓

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The Optimal Academy is due to launch in later this month.  The Academy will provide education that enables our customers to get started faster with our tools and elevate their knowledge of all things Information Architecture and UX. 

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The first courses available will be a series of Optimal Workshop tool-based lessons, including best practice study setup analysis and recruitment.  You can expect to see more exclusive content and courses from industry experts and institutions on a diverse range of topics continuing to drop in 2023 and 2024.

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Enterprise team features

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We’re committed to making things easier for our team customers, particularly on the administration side of our product. Our product team have begun discovery on improving our administration features, and have had a lot of great customer feedback to help shape up the opportunities. We are aiming to make improvements to this area of the product later this year.

We’re excited to announce the latest updates to our platform to help teams test, validate and gain insights early in the design process. Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, stay tuned as we expand Optimal’s research capabilities with new tools and features, including Prototype Testing, Qualitative Insights, and upgraded Surveys along with enhanced admin management and user roles!

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What’s new at Optimal? 🤩

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Advanced Recruitment 🙋🙋🏾

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We’re thrilled to share the launch of our new Advanced Recruitment offering with high quality and expanded profiling capabilities for hard-to-reach audiences. Advanced Recruitment leverages our in-house recruitment team and a new powerful, award-winning panel — PureSpectrum — to give you access to millions of participants across 100+ countries. Optimal handles recruitment logistics from start to finish, guaranteeing quality responses and replacing low-quality participants at no extra cost.

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Early access is now available. To get started, submit your criteria via the request form. Starting in early August, you’ll be able to access Advanced Recruitment via the Optimal Recruit tab. Recruitment is available for all Optimal tools except for Qualitative Insights (Reframer).

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What’s coming next? 🔮🧙

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Test your designs early and often with our latest tool:  Prototype Testing ⚙️
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The newest edition to the Optimal toolkit is just around the corner.  Prototype testing will allow you to quickly  test designs with users throughout the design process, to help inform decisions so you can build on with confidence.

You’ll have the option to easily import low or high-fidelity prototypes directly from Figma or build your own prototypes from scratch  by uploading images or screenshots and creating clickable areas. Prototype testing allows you to Identify usability issues and areas for improvement throughout the design process to iterate and improve your designs quickly with your users.

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Video Recording 🎬📽️🎞️
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Soon after we launch Prototype testing, we’ll be adding Video Recording to allow you to record a participant completing a prototype test. You can capture nonverbal cues like eye rolls and frustration, screens and voices to better understand user experiences, and gain deeper insights for Prototype Testing. Video recording is browser-based, with no plug in required eliminating setup complexities. Consent to record is captured upfront in the testing process and can be tailored to meet your organization’s policies.

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Qualitative Insights & AI 🤖✨‍

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You’ll be able to capture meaningful insights faster and more efficiently with the new Insights feature under our Qualitative Insights (Reframer) tool. Create Insights — takeaways or key findings from a study — and keep them organized under the new Insights tab. Create a new Insight from observations or use AI to generate Insights. Each Insight will contain a title, description, and associated observations.

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Note that you and your organization will always maintain complete control over any AI engagement. All AI-generated results are editable. Leverage AI as needed for your studies or decide to turn off access completely for your organization.

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Admin Management and User Roles 👨🏻💻
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For Enterprise customers, we’ll be introducing enhanced admin management capabilities. Create and manage multiple workspaces tailored to your team’s needs, with improved reporting and user role flexibility. The new admin role ensures robust control without consuming additional licenses.

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Surveys Upgrade 📋
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We’ll be transforming surveys with enhanced usability, advanced survey logic, and AI integration, empowering you to create, launch, and analyze surveys with ease. Our focus on improving usability will make creating, editing, and launching surveys easier than ever, including new question types, question cloning, question grouping, and AI assistance to streamline survey creation.

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Help us build a better Optimal Workshop 🧰

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We’re looking for customers to join our research and beta 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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User research is vital to the product development process as it helps product teams understand their users' needs, behaviors, preferences, and pain points. By gathering insights from various research methods, such as user interviews, surveys, usability testing, and analytics data, product teams can make informed decisions based on evidence, rather than assumptions or personal opinions.

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A UX research repository is a centralized database that stores all user research conducted by a product team, making it easily accessible and shareable across the entire team. There are many benefits to having a UX research repository, such as saving time and resources, enabling data-driven decision-making, and keeping everyone on the product team informed about user needs and preferences.

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Specialized tools, like the Treejack tool, can make UX research easier, quicker, and more collaborative. In this article, we’ll discuss a bunch of tools and how they can (and should!) contribute to a centralized UX research repository.

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Why a UX Research Repository is Necessary for Product Teams

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A centralized UX research repository is a valuable asset for product teams to store and access research data related to user experience. It enables product managers and development teams to better understand their user's behavior, preferences, and expectations, which in turn enables them to make informed design and development decisions.

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One of the key benefits of UX research repositories, like the Reframer tool, is that it saves time and resources. By storing user research data in one central location, teams can easily access and reuse existing research data. This saves them from having to conduct the same research repeatedly, which can be a waste of precious time and resources. Additionally, a centralized UX research repository can help teams to identify gaps in their research and prioritize areas for future research.

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Another advantage of a UX research repository is that it facilitates collaboration across the entire team. With a central repository, research findings can be shared and discussed, enabling cross-functional collaboration. This promotes transparency and helps to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. It also helps to avoid duplication of effort, as team members can easily see what others have done, and what is still required.

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Additionally, a UX research repository helps to ensure consistency in research practices. By defining research methodology, protocols, and use of prescribed specialized tools, product teams can collect data systematically and compare findings across different studies. This helps to ensure that the insights gained from user research are reliable and accurate, which in turn can be used to guide design decisions.

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The Benefits of a UX Research Repository for Product Managers

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A UX research repository helps product managers in several ways, including supporting informed product decisions, enhancing the user experience, and providing stakeholders with evidence-based research.

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One of the significant advantages of a UX research repository is that it provides product managers with a wealth of data to make informed product decisions. Through usability testing, user interviews, and first-click testing (check out the Chalkmark tool), product managers can gain insights into how users interact with their products, what they like and dislike, and how they use them. By storing all this data in a central repository, product managers can quickly access all research data, not just their own, to inform their decisions about product development and design.

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Another advantage of a UX research repository is that it helps to enhance user experience. Using video clips and other multimedia, product managers can share research findings with their team members and stakeholders, making it easier to understand user needs and preferences. This helps ensure that the product design is aligned with user needs, resulting in a better user experience.

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Finally, a UX research repository provides stakeholders with evidence-based research to support product decisions. By presenting research findings to stakeholders, product managers can confidently stand behind future recommendations and iterations. This evidence-based approach helps to demonstrate that decisions are grounded in data and not just intuition or opinion.

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The Role of Specialized Tools in UX Research

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Specialized tools are essential for conducting high-quality UX research as they provide User Researchers with powerful data collection, analysis, and visualization features. These tools are particularly useful for conducting usability testing, user interviews, and surveys, as they help researchers to gather reliable and accurate data from users. Integrating these specialized tools into a UX research repository can help product teams to streamline their research process and facilitate collaboration within the team.

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One such specialized tool is Treejack, which helps researchers to test the information architecture of a product or website. By using Treejack, researchers can review how users interact with navigation, site structure, and content, to ensure users can quickly and easily find the information they need. The results can then be stored in a UX research repository, allowing the team to access and analyze the data at any time.

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Chalkmark is another tool that can enhance the quality of research by providing heatmaps and click-density grids of user interactions. These interactions can be tested on mockups and wireframes. Chalkmark helps researchers to identify where users are clicking and which areas are receiving the most attention, providing valuable insights for product design. By integrating Chalkmark into a UX research repository, product teams can store and access the data, making it easier to share insights and collaborate on product development.

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Another useful tool is Reframer, which helps researchers to capture insights from user interviews and user testing sessions. Reframer enables researchers to record and transcribe interviews, tag key insights, and share findings with the team - acting as a functional research repository.

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The Role of User Interviews and Usability Testing in UX Research

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User interviews and usability testing are used in UX research to gather insights into user behavior, needs, and preferences. User interviews involve a one-on-one conversation between a User Researcher and a participant, where the researcher asks open-ended questions to understand the user's perspective. Usability testing, on the other hand, involves observing users as they interact with a product to identify usability issues.

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Specialized tools play a crucial role in conducting user interviews and usability testing efficiently and effectively. These tools can help with data collection, organization, and analysis, making the research process more streamlined and insightful.

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OptimalSort is a specialized tool that aids in conducting card sorting activities for usability testing. Card sorting involves asking users to organize concepts or items into categories to understand how they think about and categorize information. The OptimalSort tool enables researchers to conduct card sorting activities remotely and collect data on how participants group and label items. The tool also generates data visualizations and reports that can be added to the UX research repository for further analysis.

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Optimal Workshop’s Reframer tool, mentioned earlier, has been designed specifically to enable researchers to capture and organize interview data in real-time. Researchers can tag and categorize interview data, making it easier to analyze and identify patterns across participants. It then stores this information in a centralized location for all research insights.  Reframer also generates reports and data visualizations, making data efficient to share and analyze across teams.

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Conclusion

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A UX research repository empowers entire teams to make informed product decisions, enhance user experiences, and provide stakeholders with evidence-based research. They can also support awareness and participation in UX among senior leaders, encouraging further research. 

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Teams are increasingly using specialized tools like Treejack, Chalkmark, OptimalSort, and Reframer to conduct high-quality UX research as they provide powerful data collection, analysis, and visualization features. By using these tools together, product teams can streamline their research process and facilitate improved collaboration within the team. 

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Are you interested in the benefits of a UX research repository? Check out how Optimal Workshop’s specialized research tools can add value to not only the quality of your data, but how your team collects, analyzes, and shares the results!