Speed Up Your Design Workflow with AI Prototyping + Optimal

The pace of product development has never been faster, and the cost of building on assumptions has never been higher. At Optimal, we've spent nearly two decades helping teams get closer to their users, and what we're seeing right now is a fundamental shift in how research gets done. More teams are running research than ever before and timelines to act on findings are tighter, while the expectations for what research needs to deliver keep rising. 

‍

That shift is exactly what's driving Optimal 3.0, our most ambitious reinvention of the platform yet, designed to give every team the speed, depth, and flexibility that modern research demands. Today's release is the next step in that journey.

‍

Optimal's new mixed-methods research tool tears down the boundaries between methods. It brings prototype testing, live site testing, and surveys into a single, end-to-end study workflow. And grounded in our product principles: speed to insights, access for all, and communication. 
‍
‍

‍

A Unified Way to Test Usability
‍

True multi-method research

Optimal’s new Usability Testing tool marks the next step in the evolution of Optimal 3.0, giving teams the flexibility to evaluate experiences in whatever form they exist today.
‍

• Early-stage ideas and concepts
• Interactive prototypes
• AI-generated or experimental flows
• Live production experiences
• Competitor or benchmark sites
• Surveys and structured feedback
  ‍

Combine prototype testing, AI prototype testing, live site testing, and surveys in a single study. Test multiple prototypes side by side, compare different live URLs, or mix prototype and live site tasks together all in one workflow. Research can now mirror how products actually evolve, from early concept to shipped experience.
‍

‍

Richer qualitative insight collection

New speak-aloud question types, custom message blocks, auto-generated transcripts and insights, citations and highlight clips help you capture the context and reasoning behind every action. AI-assisted analysis then helps you make sense of it all fast and communicate with impact.
‍

‍

A redesigned results and insights layer

Review a study overview surfacing key themes, pain points, and sentiment analysis combining insights across all your study methods along with detailed results, task analysis and recordings, transcripts, key quotes, and automatically generated citations and video clips. 

‍

Coming soon: you can also use AI Chat to chat with your data directly, asking questions and pulling new insights and evidence across all your qualitative and quantitative inputs.

‍
‍

Six ways to put it to work

‍

1. Compare design variations in a single study, such as multiple navigation layouts, checkout flows, or onboarding concepts
2. Explore early-stage concepts before committing to build
3. Benchmark current live experience vs a redesigned prototype
4. Test staging vs production, or two campaign landing pages
5. Validate end-to-end journeys from concept to live experiences
6. Compare your experience against competitors‍

‍
Why this matters

Modern product development is no longer linear. Teams continuously move between:
‍

• Discovery and validation
• Design and iteration
• Prototype and production
• Concept and reality
  ‍

Traditional usability testing tools were not built for this fluidity.  Optimal’s Usability Testing brings the flexibility to match how teams actually work today.

By combining multiple methods into a single study and pairing it with AI-powered synthesis, Usability Testing helps teams reduce setup and analysis time, recruit once, capture richer qualitative context, compare experiences more easily, move faster from feedback to action, and tell clearer, more compelling insight stories. 
‍

Learn how to get started with Usability Testing in Optimal and accelerate your path from idea to insight. Book a meeting, start exploring in your account, or join our live training webinar on June 24th to see it in action.

User interviews provide some of the richest insights a product team can uncover. But turning hours of recordings and transcripts into clear insights can often be slow and manual without the right tools.

‍

With automated insights and AI Chat in Optimal Interviews, you can accelerate that entire workflow, from extracting insights from interview recordings to transforming them into outputs that fit directly into the tools your team already works in.

‍

Instead of spending hours summarizing transcripts and translating research into stakeholder updates, AI Chat helps you quickly generate structured outputs for documentation, tickets, and decision-making.

‍

‍

Deliver Interview Insights Directly into the Tools Your Team Uses

‍

AI Chat can surface key themes, quotes, and patterns across participant recordings. Once insights are identified, it can quickly transform them into formats your team already uses.

‍

You can control the output by specifying tone, length, structure, and level of detail directly in your prompt. The more explicit you are about the format you want, the better the output.

Simply specify the details of the deliverable you want, and AI Chat can structure the output for documentation, planning, and product tools.

‍

Here’s how teams can use AI Chat with some of the most common product, design, and research tools.
‍

‍

Notion

‍

Notion is used by many teams for documentation, knowledge bases, product planning, and research repositories.

‍

Example AI Chat prompts

• Turn these interview insights into a structured Notion research summary with sections for Key Findings, Supporting Quotes, and Recommendations.
• Create a Notion page outline summarizing onboarding interview insights with headings and bullet points.
  ‍
  ‍

Jira

‍

Jira is a widely used issue tracking and project management platform that product and engineering teams rely on to manage work, track bugs, and plan development tasks.

‍

Research insights often lead directly to product improvements, and AI Chat can translate insights into actionable tickets.

‍

Example AI Chat prompts

• Convert these interview insights into three Jira tickets including title, description, and acceptance criteria.
• Turn this usability issue into a Jira bug ticket.
• Create a Jira epic summarizing onboarding improvements suggested by interview feedback.
  ‍
  ‍

Linear

‍

Linear is a modern planning and issue tracking tool designed for fast-moving product teams. It’s often used for planning product work, managing projects and engineering tasks, and tracking product improvements.

‍

AI Chat can quickly convert insights into structured Linear issues.

‍

Example AI Chat prompts

• Convert these insights into Linear.app issues with clear titles, descriptions, and priority levels.
• Create a Linear.app issue summarizing the navigation problem identified in these interviews.
• Generate a set of tasks for the Linear.app addressing usability problems mentioned by participants.
  ‍
  ‍

Confluence

‍

Confluence is a team collaboration and documentation platform used to share knowledge, publish research reports, and maintain internal documentation.

‍

AI Chat can help transform research findings into polished documentation ready for stakeholders.
‍

‍

Example AI Chat prompts

• Turn these interview insights into a Confluence page with sections for Background, Findings, and Recommendations.
• Create a Confluence page explaining the usability issues uncovered in onboarding research.
• Turn opportunities to improve into concise post-it notes, with one key point per note, written in simple, scannable language to use in a Confluence whiteboard.
  ‍

Best practice tip: For cleaner, copy-and-paste-ready outputs, consider adding “Do not include citations.” to any of these suggested prompts.


‍

Accelerate the Impact of User Research

‍

By combining automated interview insights with AI Chat, teams can quickly move from recordings to structured insights, and share them in formats that resonate with internal teams and stakeholders.

This makes it easier to clearly communicate what users are saying, build alignment across product, design, and engineering, get buy-in, and turn research insights into decisions that teams are ready to support and action.

‍

As we close out 2025, we’ve been reflecting on what we’ve achieved together and where we’re headed next. 

‍

We’re proud to have supported customers in 45+ countries and nearly 400 cities, powering insights for teams at LEGO, Google, Apple, Nike, and many more. Over the last 12 months alone, more than 1.2 million participants completed studies on Optimal, shaping decisions that lead to better, more intuitive products and experiences around the world.

‍

We also strengthened and brought our community together. We attended 10 industry events, launched 4 leadership circle breakfasts for senior leaders in UX, product and design, and hosted 19 webinars, creating spaces to exchange ideas, share best practices, and explore the future of our changing landscape across topics like AI, automation, and accessibility.

‍

But the real story isn't in the numbers. It's in what we built to meet this moment.

‍

Entering a New Era for Insights

This year, we introduced a completely refreshed Optimal experience - a new Home and Studies interface designed to remove friction and help teams move faster. Clean, calm, intentional. Built not just to look modern, but to feel effortless.

‍

Optimal: From Discovery to Delivery

2025 was a milestone year: it marked the most significant expansion of the Optimal platform we think we’ve ever accomplished, with an introduction of automation powered by AI.

‍

Interviews

A transformative way to accelerate insights from interviews and videos through automated highlight reels, instant transcripts, summaries, and AI chat, eliminating days and weeks of manual work.

‍

Prototype Testing

Test designs early and often. Capture the nuance of user interactions with screen, audio, and/or video recording.

‍

Live Site Testing

Watch real people interact with any website and web app to see what’s actually happening. Your direct window into reality.

‍

We also continued enhancing our core toolkit, adding display logic to surveys and launching a new study creation flow to help teams move quickly and confidently across the platform.

‍

AI: Automate the Busywork, Focus on the Breakthroughs

‍

The next era of research isn't about replacing humans with AI. It’s about making room for the work humans do best. In 2025, we were intentional with where we added AI to Optimal, guided by our core principle to automate your research. Our ever-growing AI toolkit helps you:

• accelerate your analysis and uncover key insights with automated insights
• transcribe interviews 
• refine study questions for clarity
• dig deeper with AI chat 
  ‍

AI handles the tedious parts so you can focus on the meaningful ones.

‍

Looking Ahead: Raising the Bar for UX Research & Insights

‍

2025 built out our foundation. The next will raise the bar.

We're entering a phase where research and insights becomes:
‍

• faster to run
• easier to communicate
• available to everyone on your team
• and infinitely more powerful with AI woven throughout your workflow

‍

To everyone who ran a study, shared feedback, or pushed us to do better: thank you. You make Optimal what it is. Here’s to an even faster, clearer, more impactful year of insights.


‍

Onwards and upwards.