We’re excited to share some new features and product updates that we've rolled out lately and what’s coming up next.

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What's new…

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Speeding up task analysis in Treejack 🚤

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Customer feedback and research have shown that users analyse results in Treejack in a task-by-task manner. To better support this way of working, we’ve updated Treejack results to ensure the success and directness of each task are easier to compare with the new Task overview tab in Results.  This new visualisation is available in Results > Overview> Task overview section in Optimal Workshop.

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Aggregate path views 

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We have also introduced the aggregate paths view in the Paths tab (it used to only be visible via the compare tasks button). This allows users to more easily see what the popular paths are for each task and how much each successful path was used (or not). 

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Over the next few months, we’ll continue working through our results tabs to update them to a task-by-task view and highlight insights at a task level. 

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Improving the quality of participant recruitment

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We’re continuing work to improve the quality of participants recruited in Optimal Workshop. Our latest release involves eliminating all participants that rush through a Treejack study.  We’ve analysed years of participants to get a good idea of what ‘rushing’ means, and we can now identify these ‘speeders’ and remove them from our participant pools. We have also removed the limit in-app for replacement participants across all study types, and released updates to immediately eliminate poor quality participants from custom orders. 

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Help guide: How to replace study participants in-app

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What’s next:

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• Identifying participants that rush through other tools and remove from participant pools.
• Build more automated flagging and behaviours to eliminate other behaviours that indicate poor-quality participants.
• Continued monitoring and analysis to ensure high participant quality.

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Templates are here 🙌 

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We are excited to announce our first six project templates are now available. Templates have been created with industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and back your results to make data-driven decisions.   These ready-made templates give you a headstart on your research by providing you with the right range of study types and when to use them. 

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Where will they live?

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Templates are accessible in the app from the Dashboard > Browse Templates. From the ‘templates menu’ select a template that matches your use case for example ‘I need to organise content into categories’ and get going faster than before. You can edit and customise the templates to suit your research goals. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of our template journey and while we continue to build up our collection we’d love your input too. If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from we’d love to hear from you. Email us at product@optimalworkshop.com.

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What’s coming up…

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Optimal Academy 🎓

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The Optimal Academy is due to launch in later this month.  The Academy will provide education that enables our customers to get started faster with our tools and elevate their knowledge of all things Information Architecture and UX. 

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The first courses available will be a series of Optimal Workshop tool-based lessons, including best practice study setup analysis and recruitment.  You can expect to see more exclusive content and courses from industry experts and institutions on a diverse range of topics continuing to drop in 2023 and 2024.

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Enterprise team features

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We’re committed to making things easier for our team customers, particularly on the administration side of our product. Our product team have begun discovery on improving our administration features, and have had a lot of great customer feedback to help shape up the opportunities. We are aiming to make improvements to this area of the product later this year.

We’re excited to announce our first six project templates are now available in Optimal Workshop! We understand that not everyone knows where to start with customer research, so these ready-made templates have been created with UX industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and get the results you need to make data-driven decisions.  

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Templates aren’t only a great solution for people who need guidance with which study type to use and when; our detailed templates also give you the tools to develop your IA thinking, compare the performance of studies over time, and get detailed project plans to guide you through your information architecture. 

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How do templates work?

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On the dashboard, you’ll see a new button called Browse Templates. From the templates menu, you can select a template that matches your use case, e.g. ‘I need to organise content into categories’. The templates are a helpful starting point, for you to adapt to suit your research goals. 

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Let’s take a look at some of our favourite project templates. 

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Organize content into categories

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This template helps you design the best categories to organize your information based on how your  users think. It's useful for designing your product, website, or knowledge base experience, as well as re-evaluating any part of it. In this template, we will first conduct an open card sort, and then use that information to design a navigation structure that will be tested on end users.

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1. First up run a card sort with OptimalSort

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During this study, users will organise all information presented to them into categories they create themselves using an open card sort. This method is great for generating category ideas based on how users process this information allowing you to better design an experience in a more user-focused way. To find out more on how to set up your card sort, refer to our card sorting 101 guide.

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2. Test your navigation structure with a Treejack

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Based on the groupings that were produced from the card sort, you can now generate a hierarchy for your users to test using Treejack. Users search for the information you’ve categorised and represented as a hierarchy, which is valuable because it helps to confirm whether information placed within your hierarchy is findable and understandable.  
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To learn more about tree testing, refer to our tree testing 101 guide.

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Evaluate an existing navigation experience 

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Regularly evaluating an existing navigation experience is a good way to monitor the health and performance of your website and product. This template is useful for both redesigning your experience and for re-evaluating part of it by helping you design ideal categories to organize your information based on how your target users think and improve findability and task completion. 

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1. Start by identifying your top tasks using Reframer

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Using Reframer, conduct interviews with various stakeholders in your business to evaluate and theme which tasks your organization believes are the most important within your existing environment. This is a solid first step towards building a list of top tasks for testing. Reframer allows you to easily visualize and group your observations by proximity using the affinity map.  

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2. Survey users to understand their top tasks

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Next, survey users to confirm their top tasks and identify any existing issues with our survey tool Questions. This will provide insight into what users believe are their top tasks and whether anything is getting in their way to achieve them. This step helps to ensure all design work is informed by up-to-date user tasks.

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3. Design and test your current experience in Treejack  

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Using the prioritised top tasks create a tree test using Treejack to test your navigation experience with your users. For example “How would you open a home loan” or “How would you upgrade your broadband plan” This will enable you to see how your users navigate your website in order to achieve the most business critical tasks in your organization. This is a valuable step that helps to identify information and design problems to solve early in the design process. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of templates in Optimal Workshop and while we continue to add value and build up our collection, we’d love your input! If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from, let us know at hello@optimalworkshop.com.