Overview
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.
A fantastic platform that ensures you're building the right website for your users
Best tools for IA research
Optimal Workshop, optimal for remote testing
Perfect for UserTesting
Extremely optimum product
A powerful quantitative and qualitative user research tool for any design team
Lacks quality customer service and recruitment panel
Optimal Workshop is a simple and great tool for website navigation testing
Amazing tool with an even better pricepoint
Optimal Workshop is a valuable tool
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Team
$191
Individual
$208
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
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?
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
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(36)Community Insights
- 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
(1-8 of 8)- 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
Best tools for IA research
- 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
Optimal Workshop, optimal for remote testing
- User research
- Card sorting
- Tree testing
- Mobile app testing.
- User testing.
- Session recording.
Perfect for UserTesting
- 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
- Tree testing
- Card sorting
- Research analysis and qualitative tagging/identifying themes
- Price
Lacks quality customer service and recruitment panel
- 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.
- 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
Optimal Workshop is a valuable tool
- 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.