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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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Reviews and Ratings
(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
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
- Card sorting.
- Tree testing.
- Prototype testing.
- Better workflow.
- Improved time management.
- Easier to get user testing.
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.
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
- UserTesting tools
- Ability to collaborate or share tests
- Best testing practices
- Easy to collect data and information
- Great educational tool
Optimal seems a little more friendly in terms of setting up tests. We do use UserTesting as well, but it felt like that experience has more in-depth workflows to blast a test. Optimal Workshop feels like it is easy to quickly set up one test and then launch it immediately.
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
- Tree Testing
- Card Sorting
- Reframer tool (qualitative thematic analysis tool)
- Positive: Made taking notes and analyzing large amounts of qualitative data much easier.
- Positive: Helped identify research themes more effectively
Optimal Workshop has many different research study tools beyond just surveys.
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.
- Site structure decision making.
- UserTesting and UserZoom
Optimal Workshop is worse than its competitors, and I only tried it because of the price. Huge mistake.
2
Product
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.
- Optimal Workshop has prevented our organization from "guessing" and allowing us to launch a website improvement or redesign with our best foot forward and confident we're providing our users with what they need/want.
Optimal Workshop was the best tool that provided just what we needed and not anything more. The price point was also perfect for us as it provided room to try it out and then jump into a bigger package.