New Releases

With the new redaction editor in Optimal Interviews, you can now redact content before any AI-powered insights are created, giving you greater confidence and control over what information is included in your analysis.

To get started, go to Details > Privacy and enable Suspend auto-generation of insights. This allows you to redact recordings (audio & transcript and/or video image) before any insights are generated.

The redaction editor is designed specifically for removing content from recordings and analysis outputs. It does not currently support additional editing or correcting of transcript text.

This release builds on our existing automatic PII redaction capabilities. For English and Spanish (US & Latin America) interview recordings, Optimal can automatically detect and redact certain types of sensitive information e.g. phone numbers, bank details across audio, transcripts, AI-generated insights, AI Chat, and key quotes. Learn more.

Together, manual and automatic redaction capabilities help research teams better protect participant privacy, support compliance requirements, and use AI-powered analysis with greater confidence and control.

We’ve updated Interviews calendar availability to give you more control over how your Google or Microsoft calendar availability is reflected in the Interviews scheduler.

These updates only apply to connected calendars with Full Sync permissions.

A new Unaccepted events prevent bookings setting lets you control whether certain calendar invitations block your availability. This setting is turned on by default.

Here’s how it will work:

• On: Unaccepted calendar invites will block availability in your Optimal schedule
• On: Accepted, tentative, and out-of-office events will block availability
• On & Off: Free and declined events will always be bookable
• Off: unaccepted invites become bookable

You can find this setting under advanced settings via the gear icon under Collaborators.

Build profiles and define exactly who you need from demographics, location, device, job title, seniority, company size, industry, B2B, and more.

Explore the expanded targeting options for self-service recruitment and new recruitment capabilities with Profiles:

• Run multiple profiles in a single study. Create participant profiles with different targeting criteria, assign separate quotas to each, and recruit them simultaneously within the same study.

• Set quotas. Define not just who you need, but how many.

• Set exclusion controls. Automatically exclude participants who've taken part in your studies within a set period, e.g. last 3 months.

Profiles is now available in Usability Testing and will be rolling out to other study types later this year. Start by selecting Optimal Panels under the Recruit tab.

You can now use MCP to search and explore your automated transcripts from your Optimal Interviews and Usability Testing studies.

Connect Optimal with your preferred AI tool and ask questions about your sessions, without manually searching through transcripts.

Use MCP to:

• Find what participants said about a specific topic
• Spot patterns and themes across interviews
• Pull additional quotes
• Compare responses across participants, segments, or studies

You can also use MCP to instantly search, analyze, and talk to your Optimal data, including participant results, study setup and metadata, interview insights, task results, and study insights & analysis.

Learn more about how you can use MCP to uncover new insights, create deliverables, and automate workflows.

It's now easier to review and communicate compelling insights to drive informed decisions with automated highlight reels in Usability Testing.

Review highlight reels that bring together key moments from multiple participants to support findings and citations.

To access a highlight reel, select an insight and click on Show citations. Then click on the three dots (⋮) by a highlight reel to Download video.

We've also recently added options to add branding and end tasks automatically for prototype tasks to Usability Testing. Learn more about these updates.

Optimal’s new AI assistant helps you choose the right research method for your goals.

Tell us what you’re looking to learn, what you have so far (such as an idea or prototype), and how many people you want to hear from. We’ll recommend a study type that best fits your needs, along with the reasoning behind the recommendation.

Designed to make research more approachable, it enables anyone on your team to get started with confidence. Whether you’re new to research or an experienced researcher looking for the right method, it makes it easier to choose the right approach, conduct meaningful research, and get to insights faster.

Get started on your Home page.

When we heard that End study and Set auto-end conditions could be hard to locate in Usability Testing, we acted quickly to make these options more visible and easier to access so you can manage your studies with greater ease.

You can now find the End study and Set auto-end conditions on the Results tab along with the Review and publish section under Build.

We are always open to hearing how we can improve Optimal, whether it’s a big idea or an incremental change that makes your experience better.

Please reach out anytime via the feedback and feature request form.

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: Explore and download highlight reels, compiling moments that back citations and insights.

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.