We’re excited to announce the latest updates to our platform to help teams test, validate and gain insights early in the design process. Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, stay tuned as we expand Optimal’s research capabilities with new tools and features, including Prototype Testing, Qualitative Insights, and upgraded Surveys along with enhanced admin management and user roles!

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What’s new at Optimal? 🤩

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Advanced Recruitment 🙋🙋🏾

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We’re thrilled to share the launch of our new Advanced Recruitment offering with high quality and expanded profiling capabilities for hard-to-reach audiences. Advanced Recruitment leverages our in-house recruitment team and a new powerful, award-winning panel — PureSpectrum — to give you access to millions of participants across 100+ countries. Optimal handles recruitment logistics from start to finish, guaranteeing quality responses and replacing low-quality participants at no extra cost.

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Early access is now available. To get started, submit your criteria via the request form. Starting in early August, you’ll be able to access Advanced Recruitment via the Optimal Recruit tab. Recruitment is available for all Optimal tools except for Qualitative Insights (Reframer).

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What’s coming next? 🔮🧙

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Test your designs early and often with our latest tool:  Prototype Testing ⚙️
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The newest edition to the Optimal toolkit is just around the corner.  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 have the option to easily import low or high-fidelity prototypes directly from Figma or build your own prototypes from scratch  by uploading images or screenshots and creating clickable areas. Prototype testing allows you to Identify usability issues and areas for improvement throughout the design process to iterate and improve your designs quickly with your users.

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Video Recording 🎬📽️🎞️
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Soon after we launch Prototype testing, we’ll be adding Video Recording to allow you to record a participant completing a prototype test. You can capture nonverbal cues like eye rolls and frustration, screens and voices to better understand user experiences, and gain deeper insights for Prototype Testing. Video recording is browser-based, with no plug in required eliminating setup complexities. Consent to record is captured upfront in the testing process and can be tailored to meet your organization’s policies.

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Qualitative Insights & AI 🤖✨‍

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You’ll be able to capture meaningful insights faster and more efficiently with the new Insights feature under our Qualitative Insights (Reframer) tool. Create Insights — takeaways or key findings from a study — and keep them organized under the new Insights tab. Create a new Insight from observations or use AI to generate Insights. Each Insight will contain a title, description, and associated observations.

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Note that you and your organization will always maintain complete control over any AI engagement. All AI-generated results are editable. Leverage AI as needed for your studies or decide to turn off access completely for your organization.

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Admin Management and User Roles 👨🏻💻
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For Enterprise customers, we’ll be introducing enhanced admin management capabilities. Create and manage multiple workspaces tailored to your team’s needs, with improved reporting and user role flexibility. The new admin role ensures robust control without consuming additional licenses.

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Surveys Upgrade 📋
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We’ll be transforming surveys with enhanced usability, advanced survey logic, and AI integration, empowering you to create, launch, and analyze surveys with ease. Our focus on improving usability will make creating, editing, and launching surveys easier than ever, including new question types, question cloning, question grouping, and AI assistance to streamline survey creation.

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Help us build a better Optimal Workshop 🧰

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We’re looking for customers to join our research and beta panel to help influence product development. From time to time, you’ll be invited to join us for interviews or surveys, and you’ll be rewarded for your time with a thank-you gift.  

If you’d like to join the team, email product@optimalworkshop.com.

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At Optimal Workshop, we're dedicated to building the best user research platform to empower you with the tools to better understand your customers and create intuitive digital experiences. We're thrilled to announce some game-changing updates and new products that are on the horizon to help elevate the way you gather insights and keep customers at the heart of everything you do. 

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What’s new…

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Integration with Figma 🚀

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Last month, we joined forces with design powerhouse Figma to launch our integration. You can import images from Figma into Chalkmark (our click-testing tool) in just a few clicks, streamlining your workflows and getting insights to make decisions based on data not hunches and opinions.  

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What’s coming next…

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Session Replays 🧑‍💻

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With session replay you can focus on other tasks while Optimal Workshop automatically captures card sort sessions for you to watch in your own time.  Gain valuable insights into how participants engage and interpret a card sort without the hassle of running moderated sessions. The first iteration of session replays captures the study interactions, and will not include audio or face recording, but this is something we are exploring for future iterations. Session replays will be available in tree testing and click-testing later in 2024.  

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Reframer Transcripts 🔍

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Say goodbye to juggling note-taking and hello to more efficient ways of working with Transcripts! We're continuing to add more capability to Reframer, our qualitative research tool, to now include the importing of interview transcripts. Save time, reduce human errors and oversights by importing transcripts, tagging and analyzing observations all within Reframer. We’re committed to build on transcripts with video and audio transcription capability in the future,  we’ll keep you in the loop and when to expect those releases. 

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Prototype testing 🧪

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The team is fizzing to be working on a new Prototype testing product designed to expand your research methods and help test prototypes easily from the Optimal Workshop platform. Testing prototypes early and often is an important step in the design process, saving you time and money before you invest too heavily in the build. We are working with customers and on delivering the first iteration of this exciting new product. Stay tuned for Prototypes coming in the second quarter of 2024.   

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Workspaces 🎉

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Making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on projects is a big focus for 2024. Workspaces are the first step towards empowering organizations to better manage multiple teams with projects. Projects will allow greater flexibility on who can see what, encouraging working in the open and collaboration alongside the ability to make projects private. The privacy feature is available on Enterprise plans.

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Questions upgrade❓

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Our survey product Questions is in for a glow up in 2024 💅. The team are enjoying working with customers, collecting and reviewing feedback on how to improve Questions and will be sharing more on this in the coming months. 

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Help us build a better Optimal Workshop

We are looking for new customers to join our research panel to help influence product development. From time to time, you’ll be invited to join us for interviews or surveys, and you’ll be rewarded for your time with a thank-you gift.  If you’d like to join the team, email product@optimalworkshop.com

We’re excited to share some new features and product updates that we've rolled out lately and what’s coming up next.

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What's new…

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Speeding up task analysis in Treejack 🚤

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Customer feedback and research have shown that users analyse results in Treejack in a task-by-task manner. To better support this way of working, we’ve updated Treejack results to ensure the success and directness of each task are easier to compare with the new Task overview tab in Results.  This new visualisation is available in Results > Overview> Task overview section in Optimal Workshop.

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Aggregate path views 

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We have also introduced the aggregate paths view in the Paths tab (it used to only be visible via the compare tasks button). This allows users to more easily see what the popular paths are for each task and how much each successful path was used (or not). 

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Over the next few months, we’ll continue working through our results tabs to update them to a task-by-task view and highlight insights at a task level. 

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Improving the quality of participant recruitment

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We’re continuing work to improve the quality of participants recruited in Optimal Workshop. Our latest release involves eliminating all participants that rush through a Treejack study.  We’ve analysed years of participants to get a good idea of what ‘rushing’ means, and we can now identify these ‘speeders’ and remove them from our participant pools. We have also removed the limit in-app for replacement participants across all study types, and released updates to immediately eliminate poor quality participants from custom orders. 

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Help guide: How to replace study participants in-app

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What’s next:

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• Identifying participants that rush through other tools and remove from participant pools.
• Build more automated flagging and behaviours to eliminate other behaviours that indicate poor-quality participants.
• Continued monitoring and analysis to ensure high participant quality.

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Templates are here 🙌 

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We are excited to announce our first six project templates are now available. Templates have been created with industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and back your results to make data-driven decisions.   These ready-made templates give you a headstart on your research by providing you with the right range of study types and when to use them. 

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Where will they live?

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Templates are accessible in the app from the Dashboard > Browse Templates. From the ‘templates menu’ select a template that matches your use case for example ‘I need to organise content into categories’ and get going faster than before. You can edit and customise the templates to suit your research goals. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of our template journey and while we continue to build up our collection we’d love your input too. If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from we’d love to hear from you. Email us at product@optimalworkshop.com.

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What’s coming up…

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Optimal Academy 🎓

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The Optimal Academy is due to launch in later this month.  The Academy will provide education that enables our customers to get started faster with our tools and elevate their knowledge of all things Information Architecture and UX. 

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The first courses available will be a series of Optimal Workshop tool-based lessons, including best practice study setup analysis and recruitment.  You can expect to see more exclusive content and courses from industry experts and institutions on a diverse range of topics continuing to drop in 2023 and 2024.

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Enterprise team features

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We’re committed to making things easier for our team customers, particularly on the administration side of our product. Our product team have begun discovery on improving our administration features, and have had a lot of great customer feedback to help shape up the opportunities. We are aiming to make improvements to this area of the product later this year.