Most of us have experienced the pain of investing countless hours into a feature that eventually doesn’t work out at least once.
Situations like that not only are painful for our egos but also tend to be very costly for the business itself and, in extreme situations might even put the whole product at risk.
Luckily, there’s a way to limit the number of times we put ourselves in such a position: concept testing. Let’s dive deeper into how UX designers can implement concept testing in their process to de-risk their ideas early.
Concept testing is all about validating the product concept in its early phases to avoid investing in ideas that are doomed to fail.
We focus on validating:
Since viability is often validated by product managers, and feasibility is usually the domain of engineering managers, let me focus on the aspect that UX designers have the most influence on — validating concept desirability.
There are many benefits of concept testing, but the most notable ones include:
Concept testing allows you to co-design the solution with your users.
Instead of hiding in a closed-door room to design a fully fledged solution for your customers, you actually kickstart the conversation early on and check if what you are working on meets users’ needs. You can then pivot your direction based on the feedback you receive.
That’s a genuinely user-centric approach.
By testing the ideas at a concept level, there’s a higher chance you’ll discover a breakthrough insight that you might’ve otherwise missed. These insights might then help you not only further refine the concept itself but can also lay a foundation for future features and design improvements.
The sooner and the more you test with actual users, the more you learn about them, and the better your overall designs will be.
Everything you do is based on assumptions, whether you acknowledge it or not:
The problem with relying on assumptions is that they bring a dose of uncertainty to our solutions.
By testing concepts early, we can validate our beliefs before overinvesting in them, which helps not only derisk the idea we are working on but also any other concepts that might be based on similar assumptions.
The sooner we start testing the idea, the cheaper it is:
After all, qualitative research or even a small MVP is always faster to develop than a fully working functionality. Adjusting the direction based on learning is also significantly cheaper at the earlier stages.
The truth is, anything that allows us to validate an assumption at an early stage can be called a concept test, and the validation methods can differ vastly depending on the type of assumption you are working on.
However, the four most commonly used validation methods include:
Although prototypes themselves are mostly used for validating the usability and understandability of the concept, if paired with thinking out loud and follow-up questions, they are invaluable sources of insights.
Build a prototype of your solution, design a few tasks for your testers to go through, ask them to think out loud while going through tasks, and after each task, ask a few follow-up questions such as
You’ll discover a lot.
Here are some prototype testing tools for this stage:
Some assumptions don’t even need a prototype to be validated. Say you are designing a product that helps find nearby restaurants, and you assume that rating is the most important thing when considering where to book a table.
Before designing a whole product around ratings, you can first validate this by sending out a survey asking potential users to prioritize a list of factors they consider when choosing a place to eat. It might turn out that location or cuisine is actually more important.
Surveys are super cheap and, if designed well, super informative.
You can look into these survey tools if you need one to get up and running quickly:
Fake door experiments are great tools for gauging the overall interest.
The concept is simple: you create a landing page or even a new action button in your existing product, and if someone clicks on CTA, you explain that the product is not ready yet, but users can sign up for the waitlist:
A fake door is a great way to gauge what interest is in the concept.
Although MVPs are more expensive than early concept testing, sometimes they are the only way to test a particular assumption. It’s especially true when testing social platforms that require cross-user interactions — you just can’t replicate these interactions with a prototype.
Do your best to avoid scope creep. That is, focus your MVP on the indeed smallest version of your product that can help you validate the concept. It’s often tempting to “add one extra feature” to the MVP, but if you keep doing that, you’ll basically develop a fully fledged solution in disguise.
Concept testing is a powerful tool, although there are some pitfalls you should watch out for, such as:
Test with any of these, and you’ll confirm your biases or make the scope too great.
The most common mistake is simply testing with the wrong users. Get a very clear picture of whom you are designing the solution for, and then make sure you recruit only relevant participants.
Testing the concept of a new lipstick recommendation feature with conservative males will give you skewed results.
Each test is a signal of whether you are heading in the right direction. However, you need more than one signal to confirm if your assumptions are correct.
The fact that you did two tests with two users in a row, and both of them loved your concept, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good concept worth investing millions in.
Take anything you learn with a grain of salt and iterate step by step.
Just as overconfidence with a single test is dangerous, so is overtesting.
The truth is, you won’t be able to get definitive answers with concept testing alone. Run enough tests to get initial confidence you’re heading in the right direction and move to the next steps.
There are diminishing returns after five to ten tests per assumption.
Concept testing is a powerful practice that helps us increase the confidence of our design choices.
It’s a cheap way of validating assumptions that also helps us be more user-centric and gather early insights from our customers.
Although prototypes, surveys, fake doors, and MVPs are undeniably among the most popular concept testing techniques, there are many more options depending on the assumptions you are validating.
Just ensure you are testing with the right audience and maintain the balance between not overtesting and not getting too confident, and you are on a good track to designing solutions users actually want.
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