Product Update - March 2025

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. 

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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.

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

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Simplify and Refine Your Questions Instantly

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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.

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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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?

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

We’re excited to launch our video recording functionality for prototype testing, enabling you to dive deeper into the “why” behind user actions and empowering you to make data-informed decisions faster and with greater confidence.

See User Actions Come to Life

Capture the nuance of user interactions with screen, audio, and/or video recording. With Optimal’s video recording feature, you can:
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• Understand Intent: Watch users in action to reveal their decision-making process.
• Spot Friction Points: Identify moments of hesitation, confusion, or frustration.
• Test Your Ideas: Leverage user insights to make informed decisions before moving forward.‍
• Track Task Success: Combine video insights with quantitative data to understand what works and what needs refinement.
• Share Compelling Insights: Use recordings to drive alignment across your team and key stakeholders.
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Drive Value with Video Recordings and Prototype Testing

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‍By combining video recordings with prototype testing, you can unlock actionable insights that make a real impact. 
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Here’s how they drive value for your initiatives:
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• Higher Conversion Rates: Optimized designs based on real user feedback lead to increased engagement.
• Greater User Satisfaction: Tested prototypes help to better align your experiences with user needs and expectations.
• Reduced Development Costs: Catch issues early to avoid costly fixes later in the development process.
• Faster Time-to-Market: Resolve design flaws early to accelerate project timelines.
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Recruit the Right Participants for Richer Results‍

Optimal combines the power of video recording, participant recruitment, and a comprehensive UX insights and research platform to elevate your product and research process.
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Use Optimal’s recruitment service to quickly connect you with millions of people in 150+ countries ready to take part in your study. Our in-house team handles feasibility assessments, sends reminders and confirmations, reviews personalized study setups, and conducts human checks to ensure high quality participants to maximize the value of your video recordings.
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Thank you, Beta Testers‍

We’re grateful to our early adopters and beta testers for shaping the future of video recording and prototype testing. Based on your valuable feedback, we’ve made the following updates:
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Video recording updates

• Additional recording controls: You can now control whether to reject participants or forward a participant to a non-recording study link if they do not meet your recording criteria. 
• Translations: Set your study language and translate the recording instructions into 180+ languages.
• No video expirations: We’ve removed video expirations, ensuring your recordings remain accessible as long as you have an active Optimal subscription.
• Improved participant experience: We’ve improved the technology to reduce technical errors, creating a more reliable and user-friendly experience.
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Prototype testing updates

• Collapse/expand and move tasks: Increase prototype visibility by hiding or moving tasks, making it easier for participants to view and interact with more of your design, especially for mobile prototypes.
• Option to end tasks automatically: When enabled, tasks will automatically end 0.5 seconds after a participant reaches a correct destination, removing the need for participants to confirm that they've completed the task. This can improve the overall participant experience, removing steps and making tests faster to complete.
  
• Increased Figma frame limit:  We’ve increased the Figma frame limit from 30 to 100 frames to support larger, more complex prototypes.
• Expanded task results: Task path results now indicated completed and skipped tasks for better analysis.
• Time-saving improvements: Auto-select the starting screen after importing a Figma prototype, and enjoy task selection persistence across tabs in the analysis view.
• Enhanced security: We’ve updated Figma authorization for expanded security for your prototypes.
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Ready to unlock the power of video recording?
Get started with a prototype test in Optimal or visit our help documentation to learn more.

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2025 is already proving to be an exciting year for UX research, and we’re just getting started! With a range of new features and updates that empower teams to move from design to decisions faster, Optimal is bringing the best tools to the table for everyone and making research accessible across all teams. Let’s dive into what’s already here and what's coming next!
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Video Recording for Prototype Testing

We’re excited to announce that the closed beta for video recording for prototype testing has launched. By capturing screen, audio, and/or video, this feature takes research beyond metrics to give you a deeper understanding of user intent and pain points. Our Optimal Recruitment service also ensures you connect with the right participants for video recording, driving meaningful insights from the start.

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New Study Flow for Faster Study Creation

Say hello to the new Study Flow, an intuitive tab that helps to accelerate study creation, combining the Messages & instructions and Questionnaire tabs into one. Visualize every step of the participant’s journey, from the welcome screen to the final thank-you message with the Study Flow panel. Save time by quickly duplicating questions across Surveys and other study types. Navigate through studies with ease by collapsing and expanding sections as needed.

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Dashboard & Templates Library
We’re working to make research more accessible for everyone with the release of 15+ new templates designed to help Optimal users get started quickly. No matter which team you’re on, these use-case focused, ready-to-use templates will set you on the fast track. Use them to  preview the participant experience or clone the recommended study and tailor for your own use. 

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What We’re Working On Next

Here’s a sneak peek at some exciting features in the works:

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AI-Powered Survey Question Simplification
We’re unleashing an AI-powered feature to help users simplify complex question wording and improve clarity. Users can quickly accept, reject, or regenerate more suggestions with a click. By improving clarity and simplifying your questions, you’ll gather more accurate, higher-quality insights that drive better results.

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This AI feature is available for surveys questions as well as screening, pre and post study questions for surveys, prototype tests, card sorts, tree tests and first-click tests. This is just the beginning of even more AI-driven improvements to come, all aimed at helping to accelerate your time to insights.

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Advanced Logic Capabilities
We’re working on bringing more advanced logic capabilities to Optimal - one of the most highly requested features for surveys. With display logic, the study changes dynamically - showing or hiding answer options or subsequence questions based on a participant’s previous responses. Apply display logic to Surveys, screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions. This is just the beginning. We’ll be exploring additional advanced logic capabilities in 2025. 

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Study Creation Enhancements

Optimal will continue to improve on the new Study Flow to make study creation faster and intuitive. You’ll also gain greater flexibility with customizable sections. These upcoming updates are designed to empower you to create dynamic, tailored study experiences for different audiences, helping you unlock more valuable insights with ease. 
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With custom sections, you’ll be able to organize surveys and questions into distinct sections, such as demographics or product usage, to create a more structured and engaging study. These custom sections allow you to easily add, rename, reorder, duplicate, and move questions between sections.

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Join Us on the Journey
‍Stay tuned for regular updates, and let us know how we can make your research experience even better. Have feedback or feature requests? We’d love to hear from you so we can continue to shape the future of Optimal.