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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Prototype Testing

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

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Live Site Testing

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

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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.

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AI: Automate the Busywork, Focus on the Breakthroughs

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

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Looking Ahead: Raising the Bar for UX Research & Insights

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

We're entering a phase where research and insights becomes:
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• faster to run
• easier to communicate
• available to everyone on your team
• and infinitely more powerful with AI woven throughout your workflow

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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.


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Onwards and upwards.

We’ve talked a lot this year about the ways that research platforms and other product and design tools have evolved to meet the needs of modern teams.

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This includes: 

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• Reimagining how user interviews should work for 2026 

• How Vibe coding tools like Lovable are changing the way design teams work 

• How AI is automating and speeding up product, design and research workflows 

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As we wrap up 2025 and look more broadly at the ideal research tech stack going into 2026, we think the characteristics that teams should be looking for are: an integrated ecosystem of AI-powered platforms, automated synthesis engines, real-time collaboration spaces, and intelligent insight repositories that work together seamlessly. The ideal research toolkit In 2026, will include tools that help you think, synthesize, and scale insight across your entire organization.

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Most research teams today suffer from tool proliferation, 12 different platforms that don't talk to each other, forcing researchers to become data archaeologists, hunting across systems to piece together user understanding.

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The typical team uses:

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• One platform for user interviews

• Another for usability testing

• A third for surveys

• A fourth for card sorting

• A fifth for participant recruitment

• Plus separate tools for transcription, analysis, storage, and sharing

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Each tool solves one problem perfectly while creating integration nightmares. Insights get trapped in silos. Context gets lost in translation. Teams waste hours moving data between systems instead of generating understanding.

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The research teams winning in 2026 aren't using the most tools, they're using unified platforms that support product, design and research teams across the entire product lifecycle. If this isn’t an option, then at a minimum teams need unified tools that: 

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• Reduces friction between research question and actionable insight

• Scales impact beyond individual researcher capacity

• Connects insights across methods, teams, and time

• Drives decisions by bringing research into product development workflows

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Your 2026 research toolkit shouldn't just help you do research, it should help you think better, synthesize faster, and impact more decisions. The future belongs to research teams that treat their toolkit as an integrated insight-generation system, not a collection of separate tools. Because in a world where every team needs user understanding, the research teams with the best systems will have the biggest impact.

We believe that the role of UX researchers is at an inflection point. Researchers are evolving from being conductors of studies and authors of reports to strategic product partners, and organizational change agents.

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At the beginning of 2025 we heard a lot of fear that UX research and traditional research roles were disappearing because of democratization but we think what we're actually seeing is the evolution of those roles into something more powerful and more essential than ever before.

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Traditional research operated on a service model: Teams submit requests, researchers conduct studies, insights get delivered, rinse and repeat. The researcher was the bottleneck through which all user understanding flowed. This model worked when product development moved slowly, when research questions were infrequent, and when user insights could be batched into quarterly releases.

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Unfortunately this model fails in new, fast-paced product development where decisions happen daily, features ship continuously, and competitive advantage depends on rapid learning. The math just ain’t mathing: one researcher can't support 20 product team members making hundreds of decisions per quarter. Something has to change.

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The Shift From Doing to Empowering

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The best and most progressive research teams are transforming their model to one where researchers play a role more focused on empowering and enabling the teams they support to do more of their own research. 

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In this new model: 

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• Researchers enable teams to conduct studies

• Teams generate insights continuously

• Knowledge spreads throughout organization

• Research scales exponentially with systems

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This isn't about researchers doing less, it's about achieving more through strategic democratization.

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What does empowerment really look like? 

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One of the keys to empowerment is creating a self-service model for research, where anyone can run studies with some boundaries and infrastructure to help them do it successfully.

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In this model, researchers can:

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• Creating research templates teams can execute independently

• Choosing a research platform that offers easy recruitment options teams can self-serve (Optimal does that - read more here). 

• Implementing easy tools that make basic research accessible regardless of users experience with running research 

• Educating teams on which types of research and methods are best for which types of questions 

• Creating some quality standards and review processes that make sense depending on the type of research being run and by which team 

• Running workshops on research fundamentals and  insight generation

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If that enablement is set up effectively it allows researchers to focus on more strategic research initiatives and on: handling complex studies that require deep expertise connecting insights across products and teams, identifying organizational knowledge gaps and answering strategic questions that guide product direction. 

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Does this new model require different skills? Yes, and if you focus on building these skills now you’ll be well placed to be the strategic research partner your product and design teams need in 2026.

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The researcher of 2026 needs different capabilities:

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• Systems Thinking: Understanding how to scale research impact through infrastructure and processes, not just individual studies.

• Teaching & Coaching: Ability to transfer research skills to non-researchers effectively.

• Strategic Influence: Connecting user insights to business strategy and organizational priorities.

• Technology Fluency: Leveraging AI, automation, and research platforms to multiply impact.

• Change Management: Driving cultural transformation toward research-informed decision-making.

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When it comes to research transformation like this, researchers know it needs to happen, but are also their own worst enemies. Some of the biggest pushback we hear is from researchers who are resistant to these changes because of fear it will reduce their value as well as a desire to maintain control over the quality and rigor around research. We’ve talked about how we think this transformation actually increases the value of researchers, but when it comes to concerns around quality control, let’s talk through some of the biggest concerns we hear below: 

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"They'll do it wrong": Yes, some team-conducted research will be imperfect. But imperfect research done today beats perfect research done never. Create quality frameworks and review processes rather than preventing action.

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"I'll be less valuable": Actually, researchers become more valuable by enabling 50 decisions instead of informing 5. Strategic insight work is more impactful than routine execution.

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"We'll lose control": Control is an illusion when most decisions happen without research anyway. Better to provide frameworks for good research than prevent any research from happening.

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The future of research is here, and it’s a world where researchers are more strategic and valuable to businesses than ever before. For most businesses the shift toward research democratization is happening whether researchers want it to or not, and the best path forward is for researchers to embrace the change, and get ahead of it by intentionally shifting their role toward a more strategic research partnership, enabling the broader business to do more, better research. We can help with that.

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