Optimal

In 2022, we joined a global community of 10,000+ companies across industries working to balance profit with positive impact for people and the planet as a B Corp™. 🌏 This shows up in actively reducing commuting-related carbon emissions, in how we show up for each other, in how our HQ in Wellington runs (including working with local providers like the amazing Kaicycle Urban Farm and Composting), and in how we design software that optimizes resources to reduce unnecessary processing loads and energy consumption. B Corp™ is about benchmarking practices and performance across different categories, where some areas may perform better than others initially, to help continuously monitor and improve operations on all fronts to reduce the impact on our local and wider communities. We’re proud to be part of the B Lab community and to continuously work toward building a better future for people, the planet, and for research!

Design begins with deep understanding of your users and, moreover, the systems, environment, and business. We sat down with Ruth Hendry, longtime friend of Optimal, to hear her candid perspective from the inside seat on how content design and ContentOps are changing in 2026. “You're holding all those weird edge cases that only your business has, and you're making good decisions across all of it. So that’s really systems thinking across a business, and systems thinking about the people that you're serving...” - Ruth Hendry Read the full breakdown on designing for AI without losing the human on Medium: https://lnkd.in/gfjtXhzk

We’ve been hearing a lot of great questions about our latest updates to Interviews so join Gabe Young and Christine M. Chow on Apr 29 at 1PM PST / Apr 30 at 8AM NZT for the full rundown! They’ll walk you through everything from setup to insights, including how to build a research repository where your insights, transcripts, and recordings are stored and easy to access. In this session, you’ll learn about: 👥 Real use cases from users 🛠️ Getting set up with a research repository 🗓️ Simplifying your workflow with calendar and scheduling 🔴 Setting up automatic recording and integrations 👩💻 Reviewing insights and recordings ✨ Automating with AI and exploring further with AI Chat + the future of Interviews and qualitative research with Optimal! Save the date and register at https://lnkd.in/gJ7zZEBz

The people you recruit and how you track, segment, and manage those relationships over time shape your study’s results and, ultimately, how reliable your findings are. Tools like Rally UXR bring that structure to participant recruitment, handling the relationship and profile management: who's been invited, who's confirmed, who needs a reminder, screener and survey history, consent forms, and more, while Optimal handles the research: collecting quantitative and qualitative data, visualising patterns, quantifying usability issues, automating insights with AI, and surfacing the metrics and insights that actually answer your research question. This is Workflow Win #6! Here’s how to combine Rally and Optimal into a smooth, efficient research workflow: https://lnkd.in/gMFS9scc

As the adage goes: with great power comes great responsibility. As research teams increasingly adopt AI-powered tools, we're facing critical questions about data privacy, algorithmic bias, and ethical use of user information. We break down considerations for ethical AI integration in user research, and what ties it all together is human judgment which must remain central. Here’s the full article: https://lnkd.in/gK5KkBAC

We walked from our HQ in Wellington to NYC in March!🚶♀️🌏 Well, obviously not, but we did walk the distance. As a team, we racked up 17.5 million steps in March during our company-wide wellness challenge. That’s over 14,000 km (and would make for a very long, very cold commute through the ocean to ProductCon New York in May). For many, it was simply about showing up for a daily walk and for others, it was eyes firmly on the prize. And the podium is…🥁🥁 🥇 First place: Mariana Goldberg 🥈 Second place: Erik Maxwell 🥉 Third place: Alex Burke Amazing work to everyone who powered through rain, snow, and everything in between all month long around the world.

Keeping residents in the know on events and essential services, through to legal info and road updates, is core to serving a local community. So how did Cumbria County Council make their website work for residents? 🏘️ → Tree testing with 288 Cumbria with questions based on user stories → Reviewed pathways that each person took to see where and potentially why users were taking the wrong turn → Labelled new IA with new terms to see if people made sense of the labels → Further validated the new terms in a survey The impact: Seeing how real community members interact with the experience to locate the pain points. "By asking real people who use the site, you are making sure the focus of the site is truly around the user. Any discrepancies between where content sits and how it is named can then be resolved by asking the users and making amends accordingly.’" Read the full story:👉 https://lnkd.in/g7f3Tu6U #CivicTech #ServiceDesign #UXResearch #Optimal #LocalGovernment

Building for the future inherently involves risk-taking and bet-making with the fundamentals: designing for transparency, trust, meaningful control, clear thresholds for intervention, and continuous validation with diverse users. The best innovation enhances what people can do while respecting our autonomy. Be bold. Patrick Broderick, Gabe Young