New Releases

We've expanded the ways you can customize your studies in Usability Testing, giving you more control over the participant experience. Learn more about the latest enhancements.

• Add your branding: You can now add your logo, apply your brand colors, and personalize the look and feel of your studies so they better reflect your organization. Get started under Setup > Branding.

• Task auto-complete: Choose to set prototype tasks to end as soon as participants reach the correct destination and move to the next task or section. When this is enabled, the Finish task button for participants is hidden. Customize this option under a Figma prototype task > Set an end screen > End task automatically.

Up next for Usability Testing:

• Highlight reels & video clips: Explore highlight reels, compiling moments that back citations and insights. Highlight parts of transcripts to download relevant clips and compelling moments.

With the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can securely connect AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor directly to your Optimal research.

Ask questions in natural language, explore findings across studies, analyze interviews, and generate stakeholder-ready outputs, all grounded in your research.

What you can do with MCP
Get the most out of your Optimal data:

• Research assistance. Ask anything about your past and current Optimal studies.

• Cross-study synthesis. Connect the dots across multiple studies to uncover recurring themes, opportunities, and usability issues.

• Discovery. Surface patterns, pain points, and customer needs from task results, interviews, and transcripts in seconds.

• Executive summaries. Generate summaries, dashboards, and deliverables with insights, charts, and graphs, for stakeholder updates.

• AI assistants & workflows. Build AI-powered workflows using your AI tool's existing integrations, from creating Jira tickets to sharing updates in Slack.

Examples:

• Summarize all pricing page findings from studies this quarter.
• Compare findings from our mobile and desktop usability studies.
• What themes emerged across our onboarding research?

The Optimal MCP server currently provides read-only access to your research. AI tools can explore and analyze your studies, but they can't edit, delete, or modify your data.

Access to your data is secured using OAuth 2.0 authentication, giving you control over who can connect to your Workspace and which data you can access. You'll only have access to what you can access already in Optimal.

Getting started

MCP is included with your Optimal plan and takes just a few minutes to set up. Go to Integrations on your Home left side panel to start or find out how to connect with this guide.

Then, you'll be ready to ask any question via your AI tool so you can spend less time hunting for information and more time generating insights that move your experiences forward.

Self-service recruitment is now available for Prototype Testing, Live Site Testing, Usability Testing, and Surveys with AI Moderated Questions, making it easy to recruit with Optimal and start gathering video/audio/screen recordings and insights for your studies.

We've also significantly expanded targeting options to help you reach more relevant audiences.

• Recruit B2B participants by industry, job function, and seniority
• Target niche B2C audiences by specifying topics
• Recruit across multiple countries with a single order

Whether you're testing a prototype, evaluating a live experience, or uncovering usability issues, it's now easier to connect with the right people, gather the feedback you need, and make more confident decisions that lead to better experiences.

Get started by navigating to the Recruit tab in your study and clicking on Order Participants under Optimal Recruitment to set your targeting criteria and submit an order.

Up next: We're continuing to evolve recruitment at Optimal! Here's what to expect next:

• Recruitment Profiles: Recruit for multiple profiles for a single study. Set quotas and exclusion controls e.g. automatically exclude participants who've taken part in your studies within a set period. Coming first to Optimal's Usability Testing tool.

• Moderated Recruitment in Optimal Interviews: Manage moderated recruitment end-to-end: create and manage requests, review applicants, select who you want to invite, track progress, and automatically schedule sessions.

You can now purchase Optimal Recruitment credits directly in the platform using a credit card, and apply them instantly to your next recruitment order.

If you have purchasing permissions, you can buy credits from:

• Recruitment (left panel)
• Plans (under Workspace Settings or Manage Organization)

Credits are available in packs of 50 at $10 USD per credit.

Recruitment credits can be used across all supported study types, including:

• Prototype tests
• Live site tests
• Usability tests (mixed methods)
• Surveys
• First-click tests
• Card sorts
• Tree tests

To use your credits:

1. Go to the Recruit tab in a study
2. Select Order participants
3. Define your targeting criteria
4. Review the estimated cost
5. Choose how many credits to apply
6. Place order

This update makes it faster and easier to recruit participants whenever you need them, so you can keep your research moving.

If you have any questions or would like to purchase in in larger volumes or need a custom package, please get in contact with our team.

A common piece of feedback we’ve heard recently is the need for improved access to participant data and data export options in Usability Testing. Based on your feedback, we've made this a priority.

You can now review participant attributes and identifiers and export full participant raw data (Excel file) for Usability Testing.

To download, go to Results > Sessions and click the three dots (⋮) by Integrated session to download all participant session data, including participant identifiers, task outcomes, completion times, transcripts, and a range of other session metrics to make analysis and reporting much easier.

These updates give you greater visibility into your participant data and more flexibility in how you analyze, share, and work with your research.

Up next for Usability Testing:

• Highlight reels & video clips: Explore highlight reels, compiling moments that back citations and insights. Highlight parts of transcripts to download relevant clips and compelling moments.

• Task auto-complete: Choose to set prototype tasks to end as soon as participants reach the correct destination and move to the next task or section. When this is enabled, the Finish task button for participants is hidden.

• Add your branding: Customize your study with your logos, brand colors, and other options.

• Chat with your data: Dig deeper into your usability study data. Ask AI chat anything to summarize, rephrase, and generate new evidence. Leverage AI to instantly format insights and deliver clear, stakeholder-ready outputs faster.

We've introduced new enhancements in Usability Testing to help you generate more relevant insights and build your studies with confidence. Check out the latest updates:

• Generate more focused insights with session exclusions: You can now exclude participant sessions under Sessions to include quality responses. Once you've excluded your sessions, you can regenerate new results. You also have the option to re-include those sessions later, if needed.

• Download full session recordings: Dive into an individual participant's feedback and share with your team and stakeholders.

• Preview your study: Preview your participant experience easily at any point before launch. You'll find this preview button at the top left of your study to catch issues early and ensure everything is ready before launch.

Up next for Usability Testing:

• Participant data, identifiers, and data exports: You'll soon have the ability to view participant identifiers and export full participant raw data into CSV and Excel formats.

• Highlight reels & video clips: Explore highlight reels, compiling moments that back citations and insights. Highlight parts of transcripts to download relevant clips and compelling moments.

• Task auto-complete: Choose to set prototype tasks to end as soon as participants reach the correct destination and move to the next task or section. When this is enabled, the Finish task button for participants is hidden.

• Add your branding: Customize your study with your logos, brand colors, and other options.

• Chat with your data: Dig deeper into your usability study data. Ask AI chat anything to summarize, rephrase, and generate new evidence. Leverage AI to instantly format insights and deliver clear, stakeholder-ready outputs faster.

We've made an improvement to the Optimal Recorder in Optimal Interviews to better support teams and enterprise organizations with stricter security meeting settings.

Previously, if your Zoom policies blocked non-authenticated participants from joining meetings, the Optimal Recorder may not have been able to automatically join and record your interview sessions.

The Optimal Recorder is now configured as an authenticated Zoom user, enabling it to join and automatically record meetings even in environments with more stricter and enterprise controls.

No action is needed. This update is now available to all users.

Sync your calendar (Google and Microsoft) with Optimal Interviews so you can easily schedule and connect your and your team's interview availability.

Booked sessions can automatically sync back to your calendar, keeping everything up to date without the extra admin.

Get started under Schedule > Collaborators.

Optimal's new mixed-methods research tool brings prototype testing, live site testing, and surveys into a single, end-to-end study workflow. Research can now mirror how products evolve, from early concept to shipped experience.

Test multiple prototypes side by side, compare different live URLs, or mix prototype and live site tasks together all in one workflow.

With the new Optimal Usability Testing tool, you'll get a study overview with key themes, pain points, and sentiment analysis combining insights across all your study methods along with detailed results per study method with task analysis and recordings, transcripts, key quotes, and automatically generated video clips with citations.

🎙️ Join us for a live training on June 24th 1 PM PDT to see it in action and find out what’s next for usability testing, AI, and qualitative insights at Optimal.

You can now analyze user interviews in over 35 languages in Optimal Interviews to make it easier to gather and review insights across regions and global audiences!

These language(s) will be automatically detected and used to automatically generate transcripts and citation quotes in the original language.

AI Chat is also ready to assist you in any of these languages. Just start a chat, and it will respond in the same language.

Please note that the insights will remain consistent in English. PII redaction is currently supported in English and Spanish (US & Latin America).

How to get started: Head to the Language section under Details and select the language(s) spoken in your interview. You can choose multiple languages spoken in a recording as needed.

Want to see another language supported? We’re continuing to expand language support. Please submit your request via our feature request and feedback form.