We’re excited to launch our video recording functionality for prototype testing, enabling you to dive deeper into the “why” behind user actions and empowering you to make data-informed decisions faster and with greater confidence.

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See User Actions Come to Life

Capture the nuance of user interactions with screen, audio, and/or video recording. With Optimal’s video recording feature, you can:
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• Understand Intent: Watch users in action to reveal their decision-making process.
• Spot Friction Points: Identify moments of hesitation, confusion, or frustration.
• Test Your Ideas: Leverage user insights to make informed decisions before moving forward.‍
• Track Task Success: Combine video insights with quantitative data to understand what works and what needs refinement.
• Share Compelling Insights: Use recordings to drive alignment across your team and key stakeholders.
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Drive Value with Video Recordings and Prototype Testing

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‍By combining video recordings with prototype testing, you can unlock actionable insights that make a real impact. 
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Here’s how they drive value for your initiatives:
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• Higher Conversion Rates: Optimized designs based on real user feedback lead to increased engagement.
• Greater User Satisfaction: Tested prototypes help to better align your experiences with user needs and expectations.
• Reduced Development Costs: Catch issues early to avoid costly fixes later in the development process.
• Faster Time-to-Market: Resolve design flaws early to accelerate project timelines.
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Recruit the Right Participants for Richer Results‍

Optimal combines the power of video recording, participant recruitment, and a comprehensive UX insights and research platform to elevate your product and research process.
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Use Optimal’s recruitment service to quickly connect you with millions of people in 150+ countries ready to take part in your study. Our in-house team handles feasibility assessments, sends reminders and confirmations, reviews personalized study setups, and conducts human checks to ensure high quality participants to maximize the value of your video recordings.
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Thank you, Beta Testers‍

We’re grateful to our early adopters and beta testers for shaping the future of video recording and prototype testing. Based on your valuable feedback, we’ve made the following updates:
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Video recording updates

• Additional recording controls: You can now control whether to reject participants or forward a participant to a non-recording study link if they do not meet your recording criteria. 
• Translations: Set your study language and translate the recording instructions into 180+ languages.
• No video expirations: We’ve removed video expirations, ensuring your recordings remain accessible as long as you have an active Optimal subscription.
• Improved participant experience: We’ve improved the technology to reduce technical errors, creating a more reliable and user-friendly experience.
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Prototype testing updates

• Collapse/expand and move tasks (coming soon): Increase prototype visibility by hiding or moving tasks, making it easier for participants to view and interact with more of your design, especially for mobile prototypes.
• Option to end tasks automatically: When enabled, tasks will automatically end 0.5 seconds after a participant reaches a correct destination, removing the need for participants to confirm that they've completed the task. This can improve the overall participant experience, removing steps and making tests faster to complete.
  
• Increased Figma frame limit:  We’ve increased the Figma frame limit from 30 to 100 frames to support larger, more complex prototypes.
• Expanded task results: Task path results now indicated completed and skipped tasks for better analysis.
• Time-saving improvements: Auto-select the starting screen after importing a Figma prototype, and enjoy task selection persistence across tabs in the analysis view.
• Enhanced security: We’ve updated Figma authorization for expanded security for your prototypes.
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Ready to unlock the power of video recording?
Get started with a prototype test in Optimal or visit our help documentation to learn more.

AI creates beautiful designs, but only humans can validate if they work

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Let's talk about something that's fundamentally reshaping product development: AI-generated designs. It's not just a trendy tool; it's a complete transformation of the design workflow as we know it.

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Today's AI design tools aren't just creating mockups, they're generating entire design systems, producing variations at scale, and predicting user preferences before you've even finished your prompt. Instead of spending hours on iterations, designers are exploring dozens of directions in minutes.

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This is where platforms like Lovable shine with their vibe coding approach, generating design directions based on emotional and aesthetic inputs rather than just functional requirements, and while this AI-powered innovation is impressive, it raises a critical question for everyone creating digital products: How do we ensure these AI-generated designs actually resonate with real people?

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The Gap Between AI Efficiency and Human Connection

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The design process has fundamentally shifted. Instead of building from scratch, designers are prompting and curating. Rather than crafting each pixel, they're directing AI to explore design spaces.

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The whole interaction feels more experimental. Designers are using natural language to describe desired outcomes, and the AI responses feel like collaborative explorations rather than final deliverables.

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This shift has major implications for product teams:

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• If you're a product manager, you need to balance AI efficiency with proven user validation methods to ensure designs solve actual user problems.
• UX designers, you're now curating and refining AI outputs. When AI generates interfaces, will real users understand how to use them?
• Visual designers, your expertise is evolving. You need to develop prompting skills while maintaining your critical eye for what actually works.
• And UX researchers, there's an urgent need to validate AI-generated designs with real human feedback before implementation.

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The Future of Design: AI Innovation + Human Validation

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As AI design tools become more powerful, the teams that thrive will be those who balance technological innovation with human understanding. The winning approach isn't AI alone or human-only design, it's the thoughtful integration of both.

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Why Human Validation Is Essential for AI-Generated Designs

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AI is revolutionizing design creation, but it has inherent limitations that only human validation can address:

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• ‍AI Lacks Contextual Understanding While AI can generate visually impressive designs, it doesn't truly understand cultural nuances, emotional responses, or lived experiences of your users. Only human feedback can verify whether an AI-generated interface feels intuitive rather than just looking good.‍
• The "Uncanny Valley" of AI Design AI-generated designs sometimes create an "almost right but slightly off" feeling, technically correct but missing the human touch. Real user testing helps identify these subtle disconnects that might otherwise go unnoticed by design teams.‍
• AI Reinforces Patterns, Not Breakthroughs AI models are trained on existing design patterns, meaning they excel at iteration but struggle with true innovation. Human validation helps identify when AI-generated designs feel derivative versus when they create genuine emotional connections with users.‍
• Diverse User Needs Require Human Insight AI may not account for accessibility considerations, cultural sensitivities, or edge cases without explicit prompting. Human validation ensures designs work for your entire audience, not just the statistical average.

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The Multiplier Effect: Why AI + Human Validation Outperforms Either Approach Alone

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The combination of AI-powered design and human validation creates a virtuous cycle that elevates both:

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• From Rapid Iteration to Deeper Insights AI allows teams to test more design variations than ever before, gathering richer comparative data through human testing. This breadth of exploration was previously impossible with human-only design processes.‍
• Continuous Learning Loop Human validation of AI designs creates feedback that improves future AI prompts. Over time, this creates a compounding advantage where AI tools become increasingly aligned with real user preferences.‍
• Scale + Depth AI provides the scale to generate numerous options, while human validation provides the depth of understanding required to select the right ones. This combination addresses both the breadth and depth dimensions of effective design.

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At Optimal, we're committed to helping you navigate this new landscape by providing the tools you need to ensure AI-generated designs truly resonate with the humans who will use them. Our human validation platform is the essential complement to AI's creative potential, turning promising designs into proven experiences.

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Introducing the Optimal + Lovable Integration: Bridging AI Innovation with Human Validation

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At Optimal, we've always believed in the power of human feedback to create truly effective designs. Now, with our new Lovable integration, we're making it easier than ever to validate AI-generated designs with real users.

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Here's how our integrated approach works:

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1. Generate Innovative Designs with Lovable

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Lovable allows you to:

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• Explore emotional dimensions of design through AI prompting
• Generate multiple design variations in minutes
• Create interfaces that feel aligned with your brand's emotional targets

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2. Validate Those Designs with Optimal

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Interactive Prototype Testing Our integration lets you import Lovable designs directly as interactive prototypes, allowing users to click, navigate, and experience your AI-generated interfaces in a realistic environment. This reveals critical insights about how users naturally interact with your design.

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Ready to Transform Your Design Process?

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Try our Optimal + Lovable integration today and experience the power of combining AI innovation with human validation. Your first study is on us! See firsthand how real user feedback can elevate your AI-generated designs from interesting to truly effective.

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Try the Optimal + Lovable Integration today

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At Optimal, we believe in the transformative potential of AI to accelerate your workflow and time to insights. Our goal is simple: keep humans at the heart of every insight while using AI as a powerful partner to amplify your expertise. 

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By automating repetitive tasks, providing suggestions for your studies, and streamlining workflows, AI frees you up to focus on what matters most—delivering impact, making strategic decisions, and building products people love.

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That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest AI feature – AI Simplify. 

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Simplify and Refine Your Questions Instantly

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Ambiguous or overly complex wording can confuse respondents, making it harder to get reliable, accurate insights. Plus, refining survey and question language is manual and can be a time-consuming process with little guidance. To solve this, we built an AI-powered tool to help study creators craft questions that resonate with participants and speed up the process of designing studies.

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Our new AI-powered feature helps with:

• Instant Suggestions: Simplify complex question wording and improve clarity to make your questions easier to understand.
• Seamless Editing: Accept, reject, or regenerate suggestions with just a click, giving you complete control.
• Better Insights: By refining your questions, you’ll gather more accurate responses, leading to higher-quality data that drives better decisions.
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Apply AI-Powered Question Simplification to any of your survey questions. You can also use AI Simplify with screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions in Optimal's prototype tests, surveys, card sorts, tree tests, and first-click tests.
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AI: Your Research Partner, Not a Replacement

AI is at the forefront of our innovation at Optimal this year, and we’re building AI into Optimal with clear principles in mind:
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1. AI does the tedious work: It takes on repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing you to focus on insights and strategy.
2. AI assists, not dictates: You can adapt, change, or ignore AI suggestions entirely.
3. AI is a choice: We recognize that Optimal users have diverse needs and risk appetites. You remain in control of how, when, and if you use AI.
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A Growing Suite of AI-Powered Tools

The introduction of Question Simplification is just one example of how we’re leveraging AI to make research more efficient and effective for people who do research.

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In 2024, we launched our AI Insights within our Qualitative Insights tool, summarizing key takeaways from interviews and transcripts. Now, we’re diving even deeper, exploring more ways to use AI to make research more efficient and effective.
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Ready to Get Started? 

Keep an eye out for more updates throughout 2025 as we continue to expand our platform with AI-powered features that help you uncover insights with speed, clarity, and more confidence.

Want to see how AI can speed up your workflow?

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Apply AI-Powered Question Simplification today or check out AI Insights to experience it for yourself!