Lookback vs. Optimal Workshop

Best suited to conduct remote interviews that are moderated and facilitated by the interviewer/researcher.

Not the best if you want to do it unmoderated, there are much more sophisticated tools out there. Unfortunately, for a design research team that does both these kids of research, it can be hard to get budgets to get two softwares and hence the Unmoderated Feature can seem super undercooked and doesn’t really do the job.

Otherwise it’s a great tool

Incentivized

Optimal Workshop is great for UX testing for those with a budget to do so. This may be a little on the expensive side for smaller businesses, but definitely not anything crazy expensive. The insights that you get out of these tests are invaluable and can be the difference between launching a site and succeeding/failing.

Incentivized

• Organization of user interviews
• Sharing of interviews across the team
• Creating highlights of insights

Incentivized

• The user interface is quite user friendly
• Variety of tests
• Access and variety of help on how to run tests, as well as educational information on which tests to run for your use case

Incentivized

• Unmoderated interviews is still under cooked as a feature
• The process of how participants have to download an app to start an interview is a large friction point for us

Incentivized

• The recruitment panelists are not professional, nor do they take the tasks seriously. You are going to get a lot of bad data.
• They are HQ'd outside the US and must have a small team because the customer service is the absolute WORST I've experienced in their industry.
• They pride themselves on documentation, but when they fail to document something they blame the customer for the mistake.
• There are way too many limitations with the tool after you launch, limited integrations, and poor survey questionnaire options. The tool itself is far too basic for most sites, especially B2B.

Once you understand how the interface works, it works great, but there is a learning curve

Incentivized

Excellent and easy platform to use. Easy to onboard new members of the team. Easy to set up tests and follow number of participants performing the test. Easy to plug into other platforms to record participants. Excellent reporting. Easy to share reports with stakeholders. Easy to recruit through platform, however the quality of participants can be better.

Incentivized

The support has been good. No complaints. I have not needed to contact support more than 1-2 times when I was first getting set up, because the tools work well and are pretty straight forward. They do have good documentation

Incentivized

Zoom was way more expensive and it o is designed to other things apart from just running qualitative interviews. It also requires a different kind of approval and different approval processes to go through when trying to get it simply for qualitative research purposes.

Lookback records, scribes, helps observe and provides a sentiment check as well in the price that it does

Incentivized

For the price as it is very convenient for first-time beginners, its intuitiveness both for the one who is designing the activities and for those who have to interact with them. The fact that it collects and gathers the data into insights of the overall responses collected by all users.

Incentivized

• It allows us to understand our customers’ problems in a very team compatible way.

Incentivized

• Optimal Workshop has had a positive impact on investigating information architecture on several websites.
• Optimal Workshop has helped investigated the labeling on several websites.
• Optimal Workshop has also support in the investigation of UX in navigations.

Incentivized