Quickstart Guide
Your all-in-one guide to understand the value of Optimal, utilize 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 usability testing, prototype testing, interviews, live site testing, card sorting, tree testing, surveys & qualitative insights, you can uncover how people think, find and use information. Organize 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 behavior and expectations
- Highlight differences between internal assumptions and actual user needs
Our customers have commonly found that by utilizing 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
- Set up single sign on (optional - this is for Enterprise plans only, please check your subscription)
- Create your workspaces & projects using our guide
- Invite your team members
- Before diving into the tools, watch this 2-minute overview to see how to navigate the platform
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, Surveys, Interviews, Qualitative Insights.
Prioritize
Help me communicate my insights to influence and make decisions.
Key goals: Build deep understanding thfrough data, Present complex data.
Tools: Usability Testing, Prototype Testing, Live Site Testing, Card Sorting, Tree Testing, Surveys, Interviews
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: Usability Testing, Prototype Testing, First-Click Testing, Live Site Testing, Surveys, Interviews.
Our Tools
Usability Testing
Optimal Recruitment
Gain access to participants quickly through our recruitment services. We utilize multiple different global panels for our recruitment and have access to a diverse range of participants.
Surveys
Interviews
Qualitative Insights
First Click Testing
Card Sorting
Tree Testing
Prototype Testing
Read more about our best practices & tips.
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.
- Self-service Recruitment - Recruitment available in platform allows you to order participants instantly from our global panels. The procurement of participants is generated through credits which you can purchase through Optimal in app or through your Account Manager. You can target B2C users across all study types as well as additional B2B targeting available for Optimal prototype, live site, and usability tests.
- Specialized Support - Our in-house recruitment team can handle your entire recruitment process to ensure a smooth, high quality recruitment experience. This is best utilized if you’re looking for a more specialized 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 Account Manager.
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.
To keep up-to-date with the latest updates, please visit our release notes.
Here’s what Optimal's working on in the back half of the year:
Roadmap
H2 2026
Moderated Recruitment
Easily recruit and screen qualified B2B and B2C participants for your interview sessions. Review applicants, select the best fit, manage multiple recruitment profiles and quotas in a single study, track progress in real time, and message participants securely. When interviews are complete, recordings flow straight into Optimal for automated insights, highlight reels, AI Chat, and storage in Optimal Interviews.
Recruitment Profiles
Build a participant profile for exactly who you need for your study with demographics, location, job title, seniority, company size, industry, B2B, device, language and proficiency targeting. Recruit for multiple audience profiles for a single study, set quotas, automatically exclude previous participants, and save reusable profiles to accelerate future recruitment and analysis.
AI Interviewer
Guided by your study context, discussion guide, and research goals, the AI Interviewer adapts intelligently in real-time. Customize a discussion guide, response patterns, and follow-up propensity to match your research preferences. Free up your time so you can focus on insights and accelerate decision-making. Review automated key themes, insights, citations, transcripts, and highlight reels. Dig deeper into recordings with AI Chat.
MCP
Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables you to connect your Optimal research directly to AI tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor. Instantly search years of research, connect findings across studies, analyze interviews, generate reports, create deliverables, and automate research workflows using natural language.
API
By making research data accessible beyond Optimal, enterprise organizations can combine customer insights with other business data and scale the impact of research across teams. Teams can use the API to integrate Optimal research and study data directly into data warehouses, BI platforms, internal dashboards, analytics tools, and custom applications.
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 utilize 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 Center (our live chat is available in the bottom right corner)
- 101 Product Guides
- Research methods & practices eBooks
- Optimal Blog
- Troubleshooting Figma in Prototype Testing
- Follow our product updates & latest releases page
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 utilize 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