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Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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 …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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
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Product Details

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 TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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.

UserZoom, Maze, and UXtweak are common alternatives for Optimal Workshop.

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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Comparisons

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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!

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)
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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
A fantastic platform for testing use cases and user journeys when building websites.
  • TreeJack - testing IA
  • CardSort - digital options to sort
  • Made a huge difference to the confidence that our clients are developing the right websites
  • Ensured stakeholders understand the importance of IA and have less arguments about "put us on the home page"
John Nicholson | TrustRadius Reviewer
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
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.
  • Quantitative analysis tools for researchers
  • Helped us increase revenue by doing more IA work
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
  • 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.
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