Optimal Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9.1 out of 10

Score

9.1 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Optimal are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

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.

Reviews

11 Reviews

OW great job!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 22, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Optimal Workshop primarily for UX research activities, focusing on card sorting, tree testing, and surveys. The scope of my use case spans from early-stage discovery, where I test assumptions about user needs, to validation stages, where I refine and confirm the usability of proposed solutions. This ensures the end product aligns with user expectations and reduces the risk of costly redesigns later. I have used the platform only once to test a prototype directly. While it helped gather insights, I still have room for improvement.

Pros

Tree test
Card sort
Survey

Cons

Prototype Test in General.
Adding/Editing Images in Tasks.

Likelihood to Recommend

When you need to test an information architecture.

Verified User

Team Lead (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

A fantastic platform that ensures you're building the right website for your users

Rating: 10 out of 10

May 2, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

CardSorting and developing inital IA
TreeJack testing and testing of IA
Excellent visualisation of results and data

Cons

Some elements of TreeJack and where you can put the "right" answer are a challenge, but well explained in the help

Likelihood to Recommend

A fantastic platform for testing use cases and user journeys when building websites.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Corporate (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Best tools for IA research

Rating: 10 out of 10

December 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Easy to use tools for research participants
Useful analysis tools for researchers

Cons

Sometimes research participants get confused with the interface during sessions; still room to make the tools more intuitive

Likelihood to Recommend

The tools are great for user researchers who have a solid foundation with IA research methods, or are willing to learn them while using the tools. However they don't magically create valid IA studies; someone with no IA research experience may struggle to use the tools and/or run studies resulting in poor quality data.

John Nicholson

Principal in Research & Development at Marketade (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

Optimal Workshop, optimal for remote testing

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

July 18, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

User research
Card sorting
Tree testing

Cons

Mobile app testing.
User testing.
Session recording.

Likelihood to Recommend

When organizing activities like card sorting or tree testing, this tool allows us to organize them in a very intuitive way both for us designers but also for those who will interact with the activities. Also, it allows seeing what are the first things that users notice and click and how they move after each error they commit.

Verified User

Employee in Customer Service (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Perfect for UserTesting

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 8, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

Improvements to navigation to finding your things

Likelihood to Recommend

I would use it primarily for any UserTesting needs, either before, during, or after the design process. It works well to send out to an internal group of folks. I have not personally used it yet to blast out to a pool of external users. Optimal Workshop also provides some learning aspects to teach you how to use their product as well as which user test you should run for your projects.

Verified User

Employee in Research & Development (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

A powerful quantitative and qualitative user research tool for any design team

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 5, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Tree testing
Card sorting
Research analysis and qualitative tagging/identifying themes

Cons

Price

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited - powerful tool for conducting qualitative and quantitative research. Its Tree Test and Card Sort capabilities are very easy to use and powerful tools. Very nice user experience and user interface - beautiful and easy to use. Not well suited - the surveying tool was great, but SurveyMonkey is slightly better and has more flexibility and capabilities.

Verified User

Strategist in Research & Development (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Extremely optimum product

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

November 9, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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>

Pros

Cardsort.
Tree tests.
Recruitment.

Cons

Better quality participant recruitment.
Promotion of other features.

Likelihood to Recommend

Optimal workshop is best suited for its card sort and tree test features. Also the way it showcases reports for the tests that participants have performed is extremely useful. It has built a standard of reporting which is almost unmatched in the industry now. Very simple and clear to follow participant paths and to showcase to stakeholders.

Verified User

Paraprofessional in Corporate (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Lacks quality customer service and recruitment panel

Rating: 1 out of 10

October 8, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Usually, data collection is quick.
It's cheaper than other tools, but the quality of participants and data is questionable.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

My biggest issue is the lack of customer service and the poor quality of participants. After spending <b>thousands</b> of dollars with Optimal Workshop and receiving such a horrible experience, I'm now convinced that competitors like User Zoom are worth the cost and will be switching tools.

Verified User

Employee in Corporate (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Optimal Workshop is a simple and great tool for website navigation testing

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Tree testing and card sorting. Understand how users use our navigation to accomplish specific tasks. Understand how users group menu items. There are other features like where users first click, or keeping track of findings, but we have not used this features yet.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Amazing tool with an even better pricepoint

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 31, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Meredith Walter

Web Analyst in Marketing at Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

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