Quickstart Guide
Your all-in-one guide to understand the value of Optimal, utilise our world class tools, and improve your UX.
Introduction
Optimal helps you get valuable user insights faster and more easily. We’re committed to providing you with insights that influence for the best value, through our trusted partnership. With quick, easy research tools like prototype testing, live site testing, card sorting, tree testing, surveys & qualitative insights, you can uncover how people think, find and use information. Organise content, streamline navigation, and make confident, data backed decisions.
You’ve joined organizations like Netflix, Target, and Meta (not to mention JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley!) to prioritize and optimize designs and land at the solution you know will work.
Navigation
- Identify where users get lost or stuck in a menu or site structure
- Validate whether your navigation labels make sense to real people
Information Architecture
- Organise content in a way that matches user expectations
- Reveal how users naturally group and name things
Findability of Content
- Pinpoint why important information is hard to find
- Test if key content can be located quickly and intuitively
Design Decisions
- Reduce guesswork before launching a redesign
- Validate proposed structures early so you don’t waste time and budget
User Insights
- Gather evidence on user behaviour and expectations
- Highlight differences between internal assumptions and actual user needs
Our customers have commonly found that by utilising our tools they’ve been able to reduce their strain on support teams, and build further trust with their users.
Getting Started and Set Up
Getting you started with Optimal is important. To ensure a seamless set up, we suggest setting clear branding, creating workspaces & projects, inviting your team members, and securing access with SSO.
Set Up Checklist
- Access the login page here
- Set up single sign on (optional - this is for Enterprise plans only, please check your subscription)
- Create your workspaces & projects using our guide
Create & Launch Your First Study
Best Practices & Tools
- Define your goals and tasks
- Define your research job-to-be-done & goal: avoid scope creep!
- Design questions in a non-leading way to avoid suggestion bias. AI Simplify can help with this!
- Decide which study types align with the product development lifecycle
- Define your audience
- Define target audience
- Avoid demographic bias - recruit a diverse group
- Write pre-screening questions for segmentation & filtering
Optimal Recruitment can help find you the right participants for any user profile.
- Keep it short and effective
- Avoid cognitive overload -> < 10 mins
- Check to make sure tasks are clear, and concise
- Randomize the task order when appropriate
- Choose Your Tool
Discover
Help me discover my users problems and needs.
Key goals:
- Understand the problem
- Validate assumptions early and reduce risk
- Review the status quo
Tools:
- Recruitment
- Qualitative Insights
- Surveys
Prioritize
Help me communicate my insights to influence and make decisions.
Key goals:
- Build deep understanding thfrough data
- Present complex data
Tools:
- Card Sorting
- Tree Testing
Optimize
Help me to build solutions to my users' problems that address their needs.
Key goals:
- Structure solutions
- Test proposed solutions
- Product maintenance and evolution
Tools:
- Prototype Testing
- First-Click Testing
- Live Site Testing
Our Tools
Optimal Recruitment
Gain access to participants quickly through our managed recruitment services. We utilise multiple different global panels for our recruitment and have access to a diverse range of participants.
Interviews
Get straight to the aha! moments. Upload videos and let AI automatically surface key themes and insights to inspire action and outcomes.
Qualitative Insights
Make sense of studies that aren't quantitative - help make sense of things like interviews, notes, or open ended feedback.
First Click Testing
Test the basic usability and page navigation of an existing website, app, wireframe, or new design idea
Prototype Testing
Validate designs with real users through interactive prototypes. Import your Figma designs into Optimal or upload images, and make them interactive for participants.
Live Site Testing
See how your website performs against competitors, without having to embed any code! Get early access to our Live Site Testing here.
Read more about our best practices & tips here
Recruitment
Optimal Recruitment is a service we offer, where we help to connect you with participants with varying requirements, all over the world, to participate in your studies. We offer two Optimal Recruitment services to help you quickly connect with millions of people in 150+ countries.
- Managed Recruitment - Our in-house recruitment team can handle your entire recruitment process to ensure a smooth, high quality recruitment experience. This is best utilised if you’re looking for a more specialised demographic of participants. If you’re interested in pursuing our managed recruitment services, you can fill out the form online form here, or talk to your Customer Success Manager.
- Standard Recruitment - Standard recruitment focuses on targeting a less specialized demographic of people. The procurement of participants is generated through credits which you can purchase through Optimal (in app, or through your Customer Success Manager), and utilise in the platform to connect with your participants.
For more information please contact your Customer Success Manager.
Templates and Repeatable Workflows
We have a range of templates available to use, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you run a study. Templates and repeatable workflows let you quickly set up projects with proven structures - ensuring consistency, speed, and quality across your research. From first click to final insight, the pre-built frameworks help your team work smarter, reduce errors, and deliver results faster - so you can focus on uncovering meaningful findings.
Access our full library of templates by logging in > navigating to your Dashboard and clicking the top right button on the page labelled ‘view templates’.
Coming Soon
It’s a really exciting time here at Optimal - mapping out the future in the ever changing landscape of UX. Optimal is in a unique position to not only meet the current needs of the market but be proactive in creating the future of UX. By listening to our customers we have built and are continuing to build products that drive speed to insight, enable access to all and provide confident decisions that are backed by evidence. Here’s what’s in store for the back half of the year:
For more information, you can reach out to your Customer Success manager, or follow our product updates page here.
H2 Roadmap
Jul - Dec 2025
Modern Design Updates
Optimal’s new Home and refreshed Studies pages are designed to help users of any UX experience level navigate with ease, get started, and uncover insights quickly.
Moderated Interview Insights
Upload recorded interviews, and let AI instantly surface the aha! moments.
Get automated insights and highlight reels, then explore further with AI chat.
Prototype & Mobile Testing Enhancements
Uncover deeper findings by testing multiple prototypes in one study and mobile screen recording available for prototype and live site tests.
Smart Study Setup
Empower everyone on your team to run the quality research they need.
Guided AI study setup and planning make it easy to launch studies quickly and confidently at any experience level.
Invite Stakeholders & Involve Other Teams in Optimal
Our Customers have commonly found that Optimal has been able to decrease strain on their support teams, drive value through platform engagement & validate their decision making prior to final decisions being made. With unlimited seating, you can invite other teams to utilise the tool, drive their own research and see the results themselves. We believe that value comes from making validated decisions and these decisions aren’t just limited to one team.
Troubleshooting & Support
- Help Centre (our live chat is available in the bottom right corner)
- 101 Product Guides
- Research methods & practices eBooks
- Optimal Workshop Blog
- Troubleshooting Figma in Prototype Testing
- Follow our product updates & latest releases page here
When you create a study, you’ll see this icon in the top-right corner. Click it anytime for a dropdown menu with direct links to the relevant Help Center article/s.
Our Customers have commonly found that Optimal has been able to decrease strain on their support teams, drive value through platform engagement & validate their decision making prior to final decisions being made. With unlimited seating, you can invite other teams to utilise the tool, drive their own research and see the results themselves. We believe that value comes from making validated decisions and these decisions aren’t just limited to one team.
Global Customer Support
Troubleshooting and product support within a few hours
support@optimalworkshop.com
Participant Recruitment Concierge
End to end managed recruitment support
Recruitment quick start guide