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Over the past year, we've spoken to more than a hundred people about the challenges of running interviews and moderated research.

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In a study of 90 researchers, designers, and product owners, 61% said they regularly conduct structured one-on-one interviews. Interviewing is still one of the most valuable methods available, but it still runs into challenges and barriers.

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Modern product teams are moving faster than ever, fueled by automation and AI, and research is expected to keep up. But sourcing, screening, scheduling, and managing participants can still slow everything down. Teams need a faster, more scalable way to find qualified participants without trading away quality. Teams need a faster, more scalable way to find qualified participants without sacrificing quality.

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And while speed matters, teams told us something equally important: predictability and visibility. You want confidence that recruitment is progressing, participants are being vetted appropriately, and interviews will happen as planned.

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One workflow, from recruitment to insight

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With Optimal Interviews, you can already schedule sessions, automatically record interview sessions, get automated insights and highlight reels, chat with AI, and store your findings in a central repository. Now moderated recruitment is part of that same flow. 

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Everything lives in Optimal. The result is less admin, fewer handoffs, more visibility and control over your participants, and a smoother path from research question to actionable insight.

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What Moderated Recruitment looks like in Optimal: Predictability, visibility, and control

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In this next evolution of recruitment at Optimal, moderated recruitment gives teams greater visibility and control throughout the entire recruitment process.

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See exactly where your recruitment stands

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The Participant Management tab becomes your central hub for moderated recruitment. From here, you can:

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• Create and manage recruitment requests

• Track recruitment and individual participant progress in real time
• View active and previous recruitment orders

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Instead of wondering where recruitment stands, you'll always have a clear view of progress.

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Review applicants and choose your best fit

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As participants apply, you can review potential participants and determine who is the best fit for your study. Each applicant profile includes:

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• Characteristics match percentages
• Screener match percentages
• Application dates
• Participant information and profiles
• LinkedIn and social links
• Researcher notes and observations

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Get everything you need to make an informed decision. Review individual participant profiles, assess their suitability, and add notes. Choose your best match for your study, and maintain full control over who enters their study.

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Communicate directly with participants

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Need to follow up with applicants or confirm details before scheduling? Send messages directly from within the platform, no inbox-hopping required.

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Scheduling that works seamlessly with your recruitment

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Confirmed interviews are automatically added to your Optimal Interviews schedule, reducing admin and helping you stay organized. Everything works alongside your existing integrations so you can easily:

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• Add or remove interview sessions from your calendar
• Manage upcoming sessions
• Automatically record interviews
• Keep research activities centralized
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The result is a connected workflow that reduces friction from recruitment through to analysis.

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Get started with Moderated Recruitment

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Research teams are under increasing pressure to deliver insights quickly while maintaining rigor and participant quality. Moderated Recruitment helps strike that balance.

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By bringing screening and targeting, participant management, scheduling, interviewing, recording, and insight management together in one platform, teams can spend less time coordinating logistics and more time focusing on insights.

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Whether you're conducting customer discovery, concept testing, or usability interviews, Moderated Recruitment helps you move from recruitment to insight faster, with visibility, control, and confidence.

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Ready to see it in action? Explore Moderated Recruitment in Optimal Interviews.

Log in to see how it works or book a demo to learn more.

‍Was human-centered design all wrong?

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No, but it fails to capture the whole picture.

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Don Norman introduced human-centered design (HCD), the approach of putting people and their needs at the center of the design process, in the 1980s and almost 50 years later at DDX San Diego 2026, he challenged the philosophy.

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Human-centered design gave the industry an important shift in perspective, paying close attention to the people who would actually live with what we create, but there’s tension. Design can create tremendous value for people while also creating unintended consequences for cultures, communities, organizations, and the world around them.

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If we optimize for the person in front of us, what happens to everyone and everything outside the frame?

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And as technology becomes increasingly agentic, that broader view becomes even more relevant. We're no longer designing only things that people interact with. We're increasingly designing systems that can act, make decisions, and influence what happens next.

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Summary

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Emerging design philosophies

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Life-Centered Design (LCD) expands the focus from the individual user to the larger living system that the product or service exists within. It seeks to align design decisions with global goals such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

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Intelligence-Centered Design (ICD) and Human-Agent Centered Design (H-ACD) are extensions of HCD where AI plays an active role in the design process alongside human intelligence, each learning from, making decisions, and mediating the process.

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Agent-Centered Design (ACD) puts AI agents at the center as the primary participant in the process, agents building for agents.

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Key elements of design and innovation in an agentic world

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Start with the people, not the product

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Good experiences have always started with deep understanding of the people who use the product, service, or system. Needs, expectations, and priorities are shaped by environment, so what works in one market, organization, or culture can't automatically be treated as a universal truth for all.

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That's why ethnography and other forms of contextual research remain so valuable. Before asking what we should build, we need to understand the world people are navigating.

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Questions to ask:

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• Who are we really designing for?
• What assumptions are we bringing from our own environment?
• What would happen if this design enters a different context?
• What are users' stated choices and how does that differ from their actual behavior?

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The discipline of understanding people hasn't gone anywhere. It's just being asked to stretch further, to the systems, risks, and impacts beyond individuals.

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Design for the system around the human

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Behavior is shaped by systems, organizational structures, constraints, and the decisions made around you, so those factors are part of what we are designing for. Agentic AI makes this deep understanding of context even more important.

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When AI can act, make decisions, and influence what happens next, it becomes a key part of the system. Therefore, design has to account for the relationship between humans and their agents including how they work together, what artifacts are created along the way, how do they communicate, what decisions does AI make and what are its responsibilities.

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Questions to ask:

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• What happens outside the immediate experience?
• How might the system change over time?
• How do decisions get made? What's the logic behind them?

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One practical takeaway is to spend more time understanding what people actually do, not just what they say they do. Diary studies, observation, prototype testing, and live site testing can all help surface what people may not be able to articulate themselves. Rather than simply asking “why,” ask, “What drove you to make that decision?” This is an open question to prompt an honest explanation of what influenced their thinking and led them to take a certain action.

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Do more "design doing"

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Design has no shortage of frameworks, methodologies, books, and white papers. While these give us useful ways to think, real change only happens when teams transform what they’ve learned into something tangible. In the end, impact isn't measured by the depth of your knowledge, but by what you actually create with it.

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Question to ask: What's the smallest thing I could do to build or test this idea this week?

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A simple prototype will reveal insights that hours of discussion never could. A real interaction exposes the hidden gaps between what people say and what they actually do. A quick experiment tells a team far more than another round of debate.

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At its best, good design thinking must always lead to good "design doing."

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Earn influence by translating value into the language of the business

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Research and design often sits in the middle of an organization. Leadership sets direction, research gathers insight, design shapes the experience, then implementation follows. When each function speaks a different language, intent can get lost along the way.

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Designers and researchers are inherently connectors. We bring together different perspectives, make sense of complexity, and help people see how decisions affect one another. But we aren't often in the room when the decisions themselves are being made. Policy, process, business models, and organizational structures are all forms of design, yet designers are often brought in after those choices have already been made.

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There is an opportunity and a need for design thinking and "design doing" to move further upstream, and that starts with speaking the language of the people making those decisions: finances and margins.

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Questions to ask:

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• What does this insight or design mean for productivity, adoption, risk, growth, for the people working inside the system and for the people affected by it?
• What would this save, generate, or protect, in dollars, time, or risk?
• Can we connect the human story to a number?
• How can I socialize this upwards in my organization?

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Business decisions are design decisions.

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Designing for what comes next

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The next era of design is expanding what we consider when we design.

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As systems become more autonomous, designers have an opportunity to shape not only experiences, but the policies, services, and the systems around them.

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The future of design is less about finding the right framework and more about what we choose to do with what we know.

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Our monthly newsletter, User Tested is for product, design, and research teams who want to make UX research a strategic accelerator.  Subscribe to User Tested.

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We are delighted to announce that Optimal has been named as a supplier on Government Commercial Agency's (GCA) G-Cloud 15 framework, making our full research platform available to public sector teams across central government, local authorities and the NHS.

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GCA is the UK's central commercial and procurement organisation, connecting public and private sectors to achieve the best outcomes for the UK and its citizens. GCA uses its commercial expertise to create a simpler procurement experience that redirects valuable resources into essential public services – creating value for the nation.

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Optimal is listed under Lot 2b: Software as a Service (SaaS), where public sector buyers can access our UX Research Platform – a self-service, cloud-hosted platform covering usability and prototype testing, interviews, live-site testing, surveys, card sorting, tree testing, first click testing, and built-in participant recruitment.

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As a GCA supplier, Optimal can be procured by government teams through the same framework they already use, without new supplier onboarding or a separate tender process. G-Cloud is how the UK public sector buys cloud software, so for research and service teams working under tight timelines and Cloud First policies, being listed removes a step that usually slows things down.

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Already a trusted partner across UK government

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This isn't Optimal's first time supporting public sector work. Optimal is used by government and public sector teams around the world, including across the UK. 

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When the NHS team needed to turn Covid-19 guidance into clear, accessible information at national scale, they turned to Optimal – recruiting 100 research participants within 48 hours and moving from concept to launch in four weeks. The resulting Covid-19 information hub served approximately 80 million visitors at its peak.

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That's the kind of pace public sector teams need, and it's what Optimal is built for.

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Everything a government research team needs, from discovery to live service

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Optimal is an enterprise, end-to-end research platform supporting the full range of UX research and testing methods government teams rely on: usability and prototype testing, interviews, live-site testing, surveys, card sorting, tree testing, first click testing, mixed methods and qualitative insights. Participant recruitment is built in, with access to multiple panel providers to find niche and hard-to-reach audiences – the specific communities, first-time service users and specialist groups that public sector research so often depends on. 

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It's everything a government research or service team needs, from early discovery through to live service, in a single platform rather than a patchwork of separate tools.

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Security and compliance built in

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Optimal complies with the requirements of the Cyber Essentials scheme, the UK government-backed certification that validates foundational security controls across firewalls, secure configuration, access control, malware protection, and patch management. Independently assessed by an IASME-certified assessor and certified across our whole organisation since September 2026, this recognised standard gives our customers, partners, and stakeholders confidence in how we protect our systems and handle their data.

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Alongside Cyber Essentials, Optimal holds ISO/IEC 27001 for information security and ISO/IEC 27701 for privacy, and maintains a SOC 2 Type II report on our controls. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and our infrastructure is penetration-tested annually by independent auditors. You can review all of our certifications in our security center.

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For information governance teams, that means the security review is largely done before the conversation starts.

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Find us

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Public sector teams can find Optimal’s Digital Marketplace listing, or talk to us directly about working with your team.

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