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
Filter your data using keywords, tags, affinity map groupings, tasks, segments, and sessions.
Select relevant observations.
Craft your insight with a custom title and description.
AI-Powered Insight Generation (Optional)
Click "Generate" to activate our AI assistant.
AI analyzes existing observations to produce new insights.
Automatically generates insight titles, summaries, and attaches relevant observations.
AI-generated insights are marked with an AI star symbol for easy identification.
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!
Inspired by insights from Optimal users, we’ve reimagined study creation to bring you a beautifully streamlined experience with the new Study Flow tab.
With the new Study Flow, you’ll:
⚡ Enjoy faster study set up: Messages & instructions and Questionnaire tabs are combined in a single tab - called Study Flow - for faster editing and settings customization.
✨ See it all at a glance: Easily visualize and understand the participant experience—from the welcome message to the final thank-you screen—every step of the way.
🎯 Duplicate questions: Save time and quickly replicate questions for surveys, screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions.
⭐ Experience enhanced UI: Enjoy a modern, clean design with intuitive updates that minimize scrolling and reduce mental load.
🗂️ Collapse and expand sections: Easily navigate studies by collapsing and expanding sections, making it easier to build out specific parts of your study.
This Study Flow tab is available across all Optimal tools, except for Qualitative Insights.
What’s next?
We’re not stopping there. We have some significant improvements on the horizon designed to give you even greater flexibility and control.
Advanced logic: Enhanced logic capabilities is one of our most highly requested features, and we’re thrilled to introduce new capabilities to help you build your ideal study experience – available for surveys and other tools. We will first introduce “display logic”, allowing for:
If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show Question Z.
If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show specific answer options.
Customizable sections: Organize your questions into different sections to build a better study experience for your participants. For example, segment your questions into relevant groupings, such as demographics or product usage. With custom sections, you can add new sections, rename, reorder, duplicate, and move questions between different sections.*
*Note: Questions cannot be moved to/from the screening questions section.
These upcoming features will empower you to create dynamic, tailored study experiences for different audiences with ease for more valuable insights.
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.
As we approach the end of 2024, it’s a great time to reflect on the progress we’ve made as a community and at Optimal. This year, Optimal users launched over 100,000 studies with over 1.2 million participants sharing insights to drive better business decisions and experiences.
Here's how we’ve worked to make research more accessible, speed up insight discovery, empower enterprise teams, and grow our platform’s capabilities in 2024.
Democratizing Research
Research for All Research shouldn’t be limited to specialists or select teams—it should be accessible to everyone. In 2024, we focused on breaking down barriers to user research so that individuals across all divisions and teams can uncover actionable insights. Our tools are built to help anyone make confident, user-centered decisions, and this year, we’ve seen Optimal users from across all different types of teams, including product, marketing, content, research, design, information architecture, and education. We work to make our platform easy to use and learn, ensuring everyone can dive into research without barriers, regardless of their role or experience.
A Milestone Year for UX Maturity Understanding and improving UX maturity became a key focus for organizations this year. We launched our comprehensive UX Maturity Framework, complete with assessment tools that help teams identify their current state and plot a path forward. To support this journey, we developed detailed playbooks for each maturity level, offering practical guidance for teams looking to level up their UX practice.
Demonstrating the Value of UX The conversation around UX value also took center stage in 2024. Our groundbreaking research into quantifying UX impact provided organizations with concrete data to support their UX investments. Through our popular webinar and blog series, we explored different approaches to communicating UX value to stakeholders, giving practitioners the tools they need to advocate for user-centered design.
Accelerating Insight Discovery
Prototype Testing This year, we introduced Prototype Testing, enabling teams to test designs early and often. Teams can iterate quickly and ensure their ideas resonate with users before committing to development.
Video Recording (Beta) We added a new feature to Prototype Testing that captures screen, audio and nonverbal cues—such as frustration—providing deeper insights into your users' experiences.
Figma Integration We also launched Figma integration for First-Click Testing and Prototype Testing, allowing users to connect design prototypes directly to Optimal studies. This integration makes it easier than ever to test, refine, and align designs with user needs—all without leaving Optimal.
AI-Powered Insights Our AI-Powered Insights help to uncover patterns and themes in qualitative and interview data. By analyzing large datasets, AI helps you discover key trends and accelerate decision-making.
Optimal Recruitment Recruiting high-quality participants can be a huge hassle and very time-consuming. That’s why we’ve relaunched Optimal Recruitment with expanded profiling capabilities, enhanced quality controls, and full-service support—to let you focus on what matters most: powerful insights to drive better business outcomes
Enabling Enterprise Teams
Workspaces For organizations with complex structures, we’ve introduced Workspaces and Projects to give admins greater control, improved organization, and increased privacy controls. Whether you're part of a large enterprise or a growing team, these enhancements simplify governance and amplify impact.
Expanding Platform Capabilities in 2025
Looking Ahead As we head into 2025, our roadmap is packed with exciting features and improvements to make research more accessible, efficient, and impactful. Expect advancements across our platform, including video recording for prototype testing, a brand new survey tool with improved usability, advanced logic, and AI-powered capabilities to meet the evolving needs of teams worldwide. The best is yet to come - stay tuned and see you in 2025!
