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.
The only tool you need to power your entire qualitative research workflow is here. We’re excited to announce the new and improved Reframer is now live for all customers!
What is qualitative research?
It’s an integral part of any research journey. Think: customer or stakeholder interviews, prototype testing, A/B testing, moderated interviews, and open-ended questions. In a nutshell, it’s anything that isn’t a closed question.
It’s also the most popular research method – 85% of people who do research conduct interviews and usability tests as part of their projects or workflows.
85% of researchers conduct qualitative research, such as user interviews or usability testing
How can Reframer help me with my qualitative research?
It’s no secret that anyone conducting research is time-poor. Qualitative research is especially time-consuming and messy, as it’s almost always conducted across multiple tools or mediums.
Reframer gives you your time back, and enables you to manage your entire qualitative research workflow within one single tool.
From setting up and conducting interviews, through to analyzing your data – you can uncover those juicy insights in days, not weeks (or months) without ever having to leave the Optimal Workshop app.
Powerful, in depth tagging and analysis tools
Analyzing and making sense of your interview or usability testing data with Reframer is easy and flexible (not to mention very aesthetically pleasing!)
Visualize and group observations with the affinity map
Affinity mapping is a flexible and visual way to quickly group, organize and make sense of qualitative data (i.e. post-its and whiteboards).
With Reframer, affinity mapping is more powerful than ever. Your observations, tags and themes are all connected and stored in one place. It’s easy to search and filter your data, group like observations by proximity, then review and sort them in table format.
Visualize and group observations by proximity with the affinity map
Discover patterns with the theme builder
The Themes tab offers tag-based analysis with powerful filters. It enables you to explore the relationships between your observations and then create themes based on these relationships. This gives you more quantifiable results to support the qualitative, observation-based analysis that you’ve done in the affinity map.
The theme builder's powerful filters help you discover patterns in your observations
Explore connections between tags with the chord diagram
The chord diagram is a beautifully visual way to easily explore the relationships between your tagged observations and spot key themes.
If you’ve got a lot of tags, it may look a little overwhelming to start with. But don’t let that fool you – it’s easy to get the hang of, and once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever analyzed data without it!
Explore connections between tags and uncover key themes with the chord diagram
Real-time collaboration with your team
We recommend that you conduct qualitative research as a team, whenever you can. Reframer makes this easy – it was built with collaboration in mind.
Invite study members
On an Optimal Workshop team plan, you can work together from start to finish. Team members can take notes and create or use tags during interview sessions. In the affinity map, you can work collaboratively to group and edit observations in real-time.
Invite guest notetakers
If you just need an extra helping hand with taking notes during your interviews or usability tests, you can invite guest notetakers to your sessions. Guest notetakers can take notes in the sessions you invite them to, but can’t see notes taken by others or analyze data.
The guest notetakers feature is a great way to involve your wider team or stakeholders in your user research activities.
Share your findings
Need the raw data from your interviews? Want to share your affinity map visuals with other team members? Both are easily downloadable with the click of a button!
Work collaboratively with team members - take notes, tag, and analyze
An intuitive, end-to-end workflow
When it comes to conducting qualitative research, Reframer is faster, easier and tidier than using other digital (or manual) tools. It houses all your data and insights in one place and supports the collaborative nature of qualitative research.
It’s not just for seasoned researchers either. We’ve put special focus on ensuring that the analysis is easy to learn for anyone doing qualitative research, regardless of skill level. And our in-app guidance will have you up to speed in no time.
So what are you waiting for? Login now and get started on your Reframer journey!
Optimal Surveys helps product, design and research teams capture the user insights that actually drive decisions—from feature validation to user journey optimization. Now it's getting even smarter.
Research shows that when surveys are customized, people give more thoughtful answers and are less likely to drop out.
That’s why we’re really excited to roll out one of our most requested survey features: Display Logic!
This new capability creates truly dynamic surveys that eliminate irrelevant questions and reduce drop-off rates. Instead of moving users through generic questionnaires, Display Logic shows each participant only what matters to them, giving you higher-quality data and more targeted insights.
Combined with our existing branching logic, you now have complete control over creating survey experiences that feel personal, not repetitive.
Why Dynamic Surveys Matters
Better data quality
When participants only see relevant questions, their answers are more thoughtful and accurate. More focused questions mean better insights.
More targeted insights
Use previous responses to drill deeper into specific topics—or skip over areas that don’t apply. You’ll uncover richer insights without extra noise.
Faster, more focused studies
Customizing the survey cuts out extra questions, keeps participants engaged, and helps them move through faster. Plus, a better experience means they’re more likely to take part in your future research.
What You Can Do with Display Logic
Set multiple logic conditions for one question
Show or hide questions or answers based on earlier responses from radio, Likert, and dropdown questions
Apply logic across screeners, pre- and post-study questions, and survey questions
Smarter Optimal Surveys
We've been doubling down on making Optimal surveys both user-friendly and best-in-class for delivering insights. To help you get the most out of your surveys, we’ve added AI Simplify to suggest clearer, more effective question wording to help you engage participants and get higher-quality data.
We’ve also recently launched automated Insights for open-text responses. This feature takes the grunt work out of analysis by instantly surfacing key themes from open-text and matrix responses.
These are just a few of the ways we’re shaping Optimal into one of the most thoughtful and effective survey tools out there. With powerful AI features like question writing and instant insights built right in, we’re making it easier than ever to go from idea to impact.
Whether you're running usability studies, product tests, or market research, Optimal’s display logic and other survey tools help you create cleaner, more efficient surveys from start to finish. Start tailoring your surveys today to drive data-backed decisions.
