At Optimal, our mission has always been simple: help teams understand their users faster, easier, and with more confidence.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of early access for Interviews, a brand-new tool designed to save you hours in video analysis. Register for early access.

Automate your research, accelerate your insights with:

• Instant clarity: Upload your interviews and let AI automatically surface key themes, pain points, opportunities, and other key insights.

• Deeper exploration: Ask follow-up questions and anything with AI chat. Every insight comes with supporting video evidence, so you can back up recommendations with real user feedback.

• Automatic highlight reels: Generate clips and compilations that spotlight the takeaways that matter.

• Real user voices: Turn insight into impact with user feedback clips and videos. Share insights and download clips to drive product and stakeholder decisions.

Interviews not available on your current Optimal plan? Please get in touch with your customer success manager or support to learn more.

You can also join our upcoming training webinar on Oct 21st at 12 PM PST. Join us live or register to receive a copy of the recording.

We've added a new Recruitment tab to your left side panel, making it easier to manage your recruitment needs.

Here's what's included:

• Purchase credits and view your credit balance
• Explore flexible recruitment options and understand how it works in Optimal
• Read our FAQs section for quick answers

Have feedback for our team? Please reach out via the feedback form or live chat.

We’ve taken your feedback on board for the new Home and refreshed Studies pages! Here's what's new:

Grid/List toggle: Now you can choose how you browse your studies on the Home page, Studies page, and within your Folders.

Toggle between the card view and list view to review your work in the way that works best for you.

In list view under a Project, you can use the sort options to quickly locate the studies you need.

New sorting options: In addition to date and alphabetical sorting, you can now sort by Study Type and Status.

We’ve expanded the new Studies page to make it easier and faster to find what you need with:

🔎 Smart search: Quickly find studies, folders, and projects by name or study tool.

📌 Quick bookmarks: Pin your most-used projects for easy access.

⬆️ Sort: Sort your studies, projects, and folders alphabetically or by date last modified or created.

Import Figma design links: We’ve made some exciting improvements to our Figma integration to give you more options to set up a prototype test. Along with importing prototype files, you can now upload full design file links directly from Figma.

Frame limit increase to 200: We’ve also increased the frame limit from 100 to 200 per file, so you can test more interactive, sophisticated prototypes without worrying about running into restrictions.

Clearer guidance: On top of that, we’ve revisited error codes and updated in-app guidance to bring more clarity when things don’t work as expected, helping you get unstuck faster.

These updates build on our ongoing work to enhance prototype testing and improve the experience. We recently focused on performance improvements like speeding up Figma imports by 50% and expanding capabilities like support for overlay tracking, and we’re not stopping there. Read more.

Have ideas for what you’d like to see next?

Share your thoughts through our feature request form.

We've redesigned your experience with a sleek, modern Home and refreshed Studies page, making it easier and faster for users of any experience level to get started quickly and easily with studies.

Check out what’s new:

• One-click study creation: Launch a new study directly from your Home page
• Updated navigation: Access Workspaces and Settings from the new left panel
• Reorganized content: Find your Projects and Recent Studies under the Studies section in the left panel
• New training resources: A dedicated section with resources to help you get started quickly and make the most out of Optimal.

Quick note: Your URL has changed to end in /dashboard to /home. Be sure to update any bookmarks you may have saved.

Enjoy a smoother workflow that gets you from idea to insights faster.

We’ve taken on feedback from customers to make the experience with Figma files for prototype tests faster, smoother, and more reliable. Check out the latest upgrades:

Up to 50% faster Figma image uploads

We’ve optimized our import engine to speed up Figma uploads. We’ve seen upload times improve by 50%. For example, a large prototype with 80 frames and interactions used to take 70 seconds is now done in under 30 seconds.

Increased reliability for Figma imports

All frames from a Figma page are now imported by default. There’s no longer a requirement to manually select a starting node. This reduces setup errors and ensures every frame gets uploaded, making imports smoother and more dependable.

We’ve expanded our prototype testing capabilities–now you can track user interactions with Figma overlays!

💻 What’s a Figma overlay?
Overlays in Figma are frames that pop up on top of other content on a page. They are commonly used for modals, dropdowns, tooltips, and more. They simulate layered UI without navigating away from the main frame, making them ideal for realistic prototype flows.

⭐ Why it matters
Until now, overlays were not trackable for Optimal prototype tests. With this release, Optimal now captures overlay activity just like any other page.

✅ What you can do

Track overlay interactions: See when participants open or close overlays, what paths they take, and where they get stuck.

Set overlays as task answers: Mark an overlay as a correct destination or path in your tasks to better test intent and usability.

Capture the full user journey: Understand user flows with greater accuracy, especially for experiences built with overlays.

This means smarter insights, fewer blind spots, and a more complete view of your users’ behavior.

At Optimal, we're all about cutting the busywork so you can spend more time on meaningful insights and action. That’s why we’ve built automated Insights, powered by AI, to instantly surface key themes from your survey responses, as well as your pre- and post-study and post-task questions.

No extra tools. No manual review. Just faster insights to help you make quicker, data-backed decisions.

What You’ll Get with Automated Insights

• Instant insight discovery
  ​Spot patterns instantly across hundreds of responses without reading every single one. Get insights served up with zero manual digging or theme-hunting.

• Insights grounded in real participant responses
  ​We show the numbers behind every key takeaway, including percentage and participant count, so you know exactly what’s driving each insight. And when participants say it best, we pull out their quotes to bring the insights to life.

• Zoom in for full context
  ​Want to know more? Easily drill down to the exact participants behind each insight for open text responses, so you can verify, understand nuances, and make informed decisions with confidence.

• Segment-specific insights
  ​Apply any segment to your data and instantly uncover what matters most to that group. Whether you’re exploring by persona, demographic, or behavior, the themes adapt accordingly.

• Available across the board
  From survey questions to pre- to post-study, and post-task questions, you’ll automatically get Insights across all question types, including open text questions, matrix, ranking, and more.

Big news! One of our most requested survey features is now live — Display Logic! 🎉

Now you can create dynamic, personalized surveys that show each participant only the questions and answers that are relevant to them.

• Show or hide questions or answers based on earlier responses from radio, Likert, and dropdown questions
• Set multiple logic conditions for one question
• Apply logic across screeners, pre- and post-study questions, and survey questions

That means:

✔️ Higher-quality data

✔️ Fewer drop-offs

✔️ More targeted insights