April 14, 2024
4 min

Workspaces delivers new privacy controls and improved collaboration

Improved organization, privacy controls, and more with new Workspaces 🚀

One of our key priorities in 2024 is making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on delivering optimal digital experiences. Workspaces is going live this week, which replaces teams, and introduces projects and folders for improved organization and privacy controls. Our latest release lays the foundations to provide more control over managing users, licenses, and user roles in the app in the near future.

More control with project privacy 🔒

Private projects allow greater flexibility on who can see what in your workspace, with the ability to make projects public or private and manage who can access a project. Find out more about how to set up private projects in this help article.

What changes for Enterprise customers? 😅

  • The teams you have set up today will remain the same; they are renamed workspaces.
  • Studies will be moved to a 'Default project' within the new workspace, from here you can decide how you would like to organize your studies and access to them.

  • You can create new projects, move studies into them, and use the new privacy features to control who has access to studies or leave them as public access.

  • Optimal Workshop are here to help if you would like to review your account structure and make changes, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Watch the video 🎞️

What changes for Professional and Team customers? 😨

Customers on either a Professional or Team plan will notice the studies tab will now be called Workspace. We have introduced another layer of organization called projects, and there is a new-look sidebar on the left to create projects, folders, and studies.

What's next for Workspaces? 🔮

This new release is an essential step towards improving how we manage users, licenses, and different role types in Optimal Workshop. We hope to deliver more updates, such as the ability to move studies between workspaces, in the near future. If you have any feedback or ideas you want to share on workspaces or Optimal Workshop, please email product@optimalworkshop.com; we'd love to hear from you.

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Get a headstart on your research with templates

We’re excited to announce our first six project templates are now available in Optimal Workshop! We understand that not everyone knows where to start with customer research, so these ready-made templates have been created with UX industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and get the results you need to make data-driven decisions.  

Templates aren’t only a great solution for people who need guidance with which study type to use and when; our detailed templates also give you the tools to develop your IA thinking, compare the performance of studies over time, and get detailed project plans to guide you through your information architecture. 

How do templates work?

On the dashboard, you’ll see a new button called Browse Templates. From the templates menu, you can select a template that matches your use case, e.g. ‘I need to organise content into categories’. The templates are a helpful starting point, for you to adapt to suit your research goals. 

Let’s take a look at some of our favourite project templates. 

Organize content into categories

This template helps you design the best categories to organize your information based on how your  users think. It's useful for designing your product, website, or knowledge base experience, as well as re-evaluating any part of it. In this template, we will first conduct an open card sort, and then use that information to design a navigation structure that will be tested on end users.

1. First up run a card sort with OptimalSort

During this study, users will organise all information presented to them into categories they create themselves using an open card sort. This method is great for generating category ideas based on how users process this information allowing you to better design an experience in a more user-focused way. To find out more on how to set up your card sort, refer to our card sorting 101 guide.

2. Test your navigation structure with a Treejack

Based on the groupings that were produced from the card sort, you can now generate a hierarchy for your users to test using Treejack. Users search for the information you’ve categorised and represented as a hierarchy, which is valuable because it helps to confirm whether information placed within your hierarchy is findable and understandable.  

To learn more about tree testing, refer to our tree testing 101 guide.


Evaluate an existing navigation experience 

Regularly evaluating an existing navigation experience is a good way to monitor the health and performance of your website and product. This template is useful for both redesigning your experience and for re-evaluating part of it by helping you design ideal categories to organize your information based on how your target users think and improve findability and task completion. 

1. Start by identifying your top tasks using Reframer

Using Reframer, conduct interviews with various stakeholders in your business to evaluate and theme which tasks your organization believes are the most important within your existing environment. This is a solid first step towards building a list of top tasks for testing. Reframer allows you to easily visualize and group your observations by proximity using the affinity map.  

2. Survey users to understand their top tasks

Next, survey users to confirm their top tasks and identify any existing issues with our survey tool Questions. This will provide insight into what users believe are their top tasks and whether anything is getting in their way to achieve them. This step helps to ensure all design work is informed by up-to-date user tasks.

3. Design and test your current experience in Treejack  

Using the prioritised top tasks create a tree test using Treejack to test your navigation experience with your users. For example “How would you open a home loan” or “How would you upgrade your broadband plan” This will enable you to see how your users navigate your website in order to achieve the most business critical tasks in your organization. This is a valuable step that helps to identify information and design problems to solve early in the design process. 

More templates from our community

This is just the beginning of templates in Optimal Workshop and while we continue to add value and build up our collection, we’d love your input! If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from, let us know at hello@optimalworkshop.com.

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1 min read

Welcome to our latest addition: Prototype testing 🐣

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of the latest member of the Optimal family:  Prototype Testing! This exciting and much-requested new tool allows you to test designs early and often with users to gather fast insights, and make confident design decisions to create more intuitive and user-friendly digital experiences. 

Optimal gives you tools you need to easily build a prototype to test using images and screens and creating clickable areas, or you can import a prototype from Figma and get testing. The first iteration of prototype testing is an open beta, and we’ll be working closely with our customers and community to gather feedback and ideas for further improvements in the months to come.

When to use prototype testing 

Prototype testing is a great way to validate design ideas, identify usability issues, and gather feedback from users before investing too heavily in the development of products, websites, and apps. To further inform your insights, it’s a good idea to include sentiment questions or rating scales alongside your tasks.

Early in the design process: Test initial ideas and concepts to gauge user reactions and feelings about your conceptual solutions. 

Iterative design phases: Continuously test and refine prototypes as you make changes and improvements to the designs. 

Before major milestones: Validate designs before key project stages, such as stakeholder reviews or final approvals.

Usability Testing: Conduct summative research to assess a design's overall performance and gauge real user feedback to guide future design decisions and enhancements.

How it works 🧑🏽‍💻

No existing prototype? No problem. We've made it easy to create one right within Optimal. Here's how:

  1. Import your visuals

Start by uploading a series of screenshots or images that represent your design flow. These will form the backbone of your prototype.

  1. Create interactive elements

Once your visuals are in place, it's time to bring them to life. Use our intuitive interface to designate clickable areas on each screen. These will act as navigation points for your test participants.

  1. Set up the flow

Connect your screens in a logical sequence, mirroring the user journey you want to test. This creates a seamless, interactive experience for your participants.

  1. Preview and refine

Before launching your study, take a moment to walk through your prototype. Ensure all clickable areas work as intended and the flow feels natural.

The result? A fully functional prototype that looks and feels like a real digital product. Your test participants will be able to navigate through it just as they would a live website or app, providing you with authentic, actionable insights.

By empowering you to build prototypes from scratch, we're removing barriers to early-stage testing. This means you can validate ideas faster, iterate with confidence, and ultimately deliver better digital experiences.

Or…import your prototypes directly from Figma 

There’s a bit of housekeeping you’ll need to do in Figma in order to provide your participants with the best testing experience and not impact loading times of the prototype. You can import a link to your Figma prototype into your study,  and it will carry across all the interactions you have set up. You’ll need to make sure your Figma presentation mode is made public in order to share the file with participants. If you make any updates to your Figma file, you can sync the changes in just one click. 

Help Article: Find out more about how to set up your Figma file for testing

How to create tasks 🧰

When you set up your study, you’ll create tasks for participants to complete. 

There are two different ways to build tasks in your prototype tests. You can set a correct destination by adding a start screen and a correct destination screen. That way, you can watch how participants navigate your design to find their way to the correct destination. Another option is to set a correct pathway and evaluate how participants navigate a product, app, or website based on the pathway sequence you set. You can add as many pathways or destinations as you like. 

Adding post-task questions is a great way to help gather qualitative feedback on the user's experience, capturing their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.

Help Article: Find out how to analyze your results

Prototype testing analysis and metrics 📊

Prototype testing offers a variety of analysis options and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of your design.  By using these analysis options and metrics, you can get comprehensive insights into your prototype's performance, identify areas for improvement, and make informed design decisions:

Task results 

The task results provide a deep analysis at a task level, including the success score, directness score, time taken, misclicks, and the breakdown of the task's success and failure. They provide great insight into the usability of your design to achieve a task. 

  • Success score tells you the total percentage of participants who reached the correct destination or pathway that you defined for this task. It’s a good indicator of a prototype's usability. 
  • Directness score is the total completed results minus the ‘indirect’ results.
  • A path is ‘indirect’ when a participant backtracks, viewing the same page multiple times, or if they nominate the correct destination but don’t follow the correct pathway
  • Time taken is how long it took a participant to complete your task and can be a good indicator of how easy or difficult it was to complete. 
  • Misclicks measure the total number of clicks made on areas of your prototype that weren’t clickable, clicks that didn’t result in a page change.

Clickmaps

Clickmaps provide an aggregate view of user interactions with prototypes, visualizing click patterns to reveal how users navigate and locate information. They display hits and misses on designated clickable areas, average task completion times, and heatmaps showing where users believed the next steps to be. Filters for first, second, and third page visits allow analysis of user behavior over time, including how they adapt when backtracking. This comprehensive data helps designers understand user navigation patterns and improve prototype usability.

Participant paths 

The Paths tab in Optimal provides a powerful visualization to understand and identify common navigation patterns and potential obstacles participants encounter while completing tasks. You can include thumbnails of your screens to enhance your analysis, making it easier to pinpoint where users may face difficulties or where common paths occured.

Coming soon to prototyping 🔮

Later this year, we’re running a closed beta for video recording with prototype testing. This feature captures behaviors and insights not evident in click data alone. The browser-based recording requires no plugins, simplifying setup. Consent for recording is obtained at the start of the testing process and can be customized to align with your organization's policies. This new feature will provide deeper insights into user experience and prototype usability.

These enhancements to prototype testing offer a comprehensive toolkit for user experience analysis. By combining quantitative click data with qualitative video insights, designers and researchers can gain a more nuanced understanding of user behavior, leading to more informed decisions and improved product designs.

Start prototype testing today

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1 min read

Exciting updates to Optimal’s pricing plans

Big things are happening in 2024! 🎉

We’re undergoing a huge transformation in 2024 to deliver more value for our customers with exciting new products like prototype testing, features like video recording, upgrading our survey tool, introducing AI, and improving how we support large organizations and multiple teams managing their accounts. These new products and features mean we need to update our pricing plans to continue innovating and providing top-tier UX research tools for our customers now and in the future.

Say hello to our new pricing plans  👋🏽

Starting July 22, 2024, we’ll be introducing new plans—Individual and Individual+—and updating our Team and Enterprise plans. We’ve reduced the price to join Optimal from $249 a month on the Pro plan to $129 on the new Individual plan. This reduction will help make our tools more accessible for people to do research and includes two months free on the individual annual plan, too.

We’ll be discontinuing some of our current plans, including Starter, Pro, and Pay per Study, and letting customers know about the changes that will affect their account via email and in information on the plans page in the app.

Prototype testing is just around the corner 🛣️ 🥳

The newest edition to the Optimal platform  is  days away, and will be available to use on the Individual+, Team and Enterprise plans from early August.  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 be able to build your own prototype from scratch using images or screenshots or import a prototype directly from Figma. Keep an eye out in app for this new exciting addition.

Seeing is believing

Explore our tools and see how Optimal makes gathering insights simple, powerful, and impactful.