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Optimal Workshop has been a trusted tool for user research agencies and UX departments for over a decade. One agency has relied on it for …
Starting at $191 per month per user
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What is Optimal Workshop?
Optimal Workshop, a company in New Zealand, offers their suite of user research tools on a subscription basis, including the Treejack information architecture tool, OptimalSort card sorting test, Chalkmark first-click testing, and other tools.
Recent Reviews
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Team
$191
Cloud
per month per user
Individual
$208
Cloud
per month per user
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.optimalworkshop.com/pricing
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $191 per month per user
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Optimal Workshop?
As a provider of tools for information architecture, Optimal Workshop helps organizations build better digital experiences backed by data. The solution boasts analysis functionalities, multiple testing methods, and participant recruitment to give users the confidence to deliver robust and actionable insights to the user's team.
Optimal Workshop Features
- Supported: Tree testing
- Supported: Card sorting
- Supported: First click testing
- Supported: Surveys
- Supported: Qualitative research
- Supported: Participant recruitment
Optimal Workshop Competitors
Optimal Workshop Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Optimal Workshop, a company in New Zealand, offers their suite of user research tools on a subscription basis, including the Treejack information architecture tool, OptimalSort card sorting test, Chalkmark first-click testing, and other tools.
Optimal Workshop starts at $191.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of Optimal Workshop are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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(36)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
Optimal Workshop has been a trusted tool for user research agencies and UX departments for over a decade. One agency has relied on it for conducting information architecture research, particularly using tools like Optimal Sort for card sorting and Treejack for tree testing. This has allowed them to gather valuable insights into how users navigate websites and make data-driven recommendations to clients about improving website navigation.
In addition, Optimal Workshop is used by businesses looking to solve the problem of information architecture redesign, especially for multiple products that require IA design. The product and platform team at one company has successfully used Optimal Workshop's tree testing feature to assess findability within the labeling and structure schema of a B2B site. This has helped them optimize the website's organization and ensure that users can easily locate the desired information.
Another common use case for Optimal Workshop is remote workshops, where data on user flows, actions, and behaviors are collected through activities like card sorting and tree testing. This allows researchers to gain insights into how users categorize information and make informed design decisions. Moreover, Optimal Workshop's card sorting and tree testing features have become valuable alternatives to UserTesting.com for user testing in the design process.
Customer experience and design departments also utilize Optimal Workshop for conducting research studies and analysis. This includes activities such as user interviews, usability testing, tree testing, card sorting, and surveys. These features enable teams to gather rich qualitative data to inform their design decisions and improve the overall user experience.
Even marketing departments benefit from Optimal Workshop's capabilities. They use the platform to conduct tree tests on navigation menus to understand how users categorize menu items. By gathering this valuable data, marketers can optimize their website's information hierarchy and enhance user engagement.
Lastly, Optimal Sort proves to be an excellent platform for usability testing in order to ensure a user-friendly digital presence. It becomes especially useful for website or mobile development projects where developers need accurate insights into website navigation and information architecture to create an intuitive user interface.
Overall, Optimal Workshop has proven to be a versatile tool with a wide range of use cases. From conducting information architecture research and remote workshops to usability testing and data-driven analysis, it has become an invaluable asset for various teams and organizations across different industries.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Optimal Sort is an excellent platform for useability testing and ensuring your digital presence (website or mobile) is user friendly. I've used both CardSort and TreeJack on a range of projects with clients who building or redeveloping websites, and it always provides excellent insights and data to ensure we both build a great site, and take the stakeholders along for the journey.
- CardSorting and developing inital IA
- TreeJack testing and testing of IA
- Excellent visualisation of results and data
- Some elements of TreeJack and where you can put the "right" answer are a challenge, but well explained in the help
December 27, 2022
Best tools for IA research
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are a user research agency and have used Optimal Workshop tools for a number of client projects over the last 10+ years. Whenever we need to do information architecture research, we try to use one or more of their tools. Most often, we start by using Optimal Sort for card sorting and follow it up with one or more rounds of tree testing with Treejack. Ideally but less often, we follow up that up with navigation design testing with Chalkmark.
- Easy to use tools for research participants
- Useful analysis tools for researchers
- Sometimes research participants get confused with the interface during sessions; still room to make the tools more intuitive
July 18, 2022
Optimal Workshop, optimal for remote testing
We use this tool every time we need to perform remote workshops. It allows us to collect data in an easier and quicker way, it allows us to see what flows a user performs, what they do, and how they do it. We use it mainly for activities like card sorting or tree testing.
- User research
- Card sorting
- Tree testing
- Mobile app testing.
- User testing.
- Session recording.
July 08, 2022
Perfect for UserTesting
We use Optimal Workshop for user testing on whichever product we are designing. We've specifically used the card sorting feature and the tree testing feature. Overall, we find the features pretty easy to use, though we've only used them for internal user testing versus an external audience. Some of us find it quicker to use than UserTesting.com set-up-wise.
- 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
- Improvements to navigation to finding your things
July 07, 2022
Extremely optimum product
The UX department uses Optimal Workshop. We use it for all sorts of IA work, card sorting and tree jacking. We’ve also used the participant recruitment facility by optimal workshop for all our projects. <div>In terms of business problem, it is mainly solving for Information Architecture re design for our firm, especially since we have multiple products that require IA design. </div>
- Cardsort.
- Tree tests.
- Recruitment.
- Better quality participant recruitment.
- Promotion of other features.
Optimal Workshop is being used by our organization as a user research tool for conducting research studies and analysis. It is used by the Customer Experience and Design department. It helps our research teams conduct powerful and effective research studies such as user interviews, usability testing, tree testing, card sorting, and surveys.
- Tree testing
- Card sorting
- Research analysis and qualitative tagging/identifying themes
- Price
October 08, 2019
Lacks quality customer service and recruitment panel
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Optimal Workshop several times on the product and platform team for tree testing, which assesses find-ability within the labeling and structure schema. We run a B2B site, so it's important to collect data from the appropriate user segments. Unfortunately, this tool fails in many ways, especially the recruitment service and customer service.
- Usually, data collection is quick.
- It's cheaper than other tools, but the quality of participants and data is questionable.
- 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.
We have used Optimal Workshop in our marketing department to tree test navigation menus and understand how users would categorize menu items. While simple, this tool provides valuable data that would otherwise be very difficult to gather
- Tree Testing - it is a very simple and easy to use system, that provides the data needed from a tree test
- Card sorting - provides a system for users to participate in navigation menu layouts. We looked into several options, but this seemed very intuitive for users.
- UI - It is a very basic tool, and emphasis is on functionality rather than design. They do allow some areas (like color and a logo) to be customized.
- Integrations - It would be handy to have this data tie into other systems. However, it is pretty unique, so most systems would not have a way to organize this data our of the box
July 31, 2019
Amazing tool with an even better pricepoint
OptimalWorkshop has provided invaluable insights to our website development process for "pennies" cost wise. We've been able to derive fairly quick insights that make a huge impact on our bottom line and customer satisfaction. Now that we've started using OptimalWorkshop, it's quickly become a sought after service for our internal stakeholders.
- Optimal Workshop's UI and UX are impeccable. It's incredibly easy to use and set up tests even for novices.
- Optimal Workshop's test type offerings are fantastic. They have almost anything you could need within the platform.
- Optimal Workshop's payment options are incredibly reasonable and useful whether you're doing very few tests or a lot of tests.
- The analysis of some of the tests, the card sorting and tree jacking in particular, definitely have a bit of learning curve. I'd like to see some more platform intelligence that provides context into what you're seeing and how you can implement the results.
April 06, 2019
Optimal Workshop is a valuable tool
Optimal Workshop is used at my organization for two tools: Card Sort and Treejack. These assist the investigation of labeling, categorization and information architecture on your website. We, in particular, use it to investigate websites navigation hierarchies and labeling to identify user struggles and navigations strengths. This research helps strengthen our website navigation recommendations to clients.
- Optimal Workshop conducts speedy recruitment at a fee.
- It is relatively easy to set up tests on Optimal Workshop.
- Optimal Workshop helps in the analysis of the user data by generating graphs, pie charts, and pie trees.
- Not all users take the tasks seriously, some rush through tasks in order to be paid for completing the study. Optimal Workshop doesn't have a simple way of reports this (i had to go out of my way to report more than 50% of my users had rush through my tasks and skewed my results). Although, if you get in touch with them, they will replace the participants.