When launching a new product or feature, why leave it to chance? To set your product designs up for success, you need to gather customer feedback early on and often.
Testing digital products and experiences is crucial for designing better ones. Keep reading to learn how to streamline and improve your design process using concept testing. Plus, learn the tools to help you get started.
✏️ Thanks to our friends at Sprig for sponsoring this blog post!
What is concept testing?
With more than 25% of revenue and profits directly attributed to new products, according to McKinsey, there’s a lot of pressure on designers to build the right features. This makes launching your company’s products and features a complicated process.
To succeed in your market, you need to make sure your product resonates with your customers before launching. That’s where concept testing comes in.
With concept testing, you can rest assured that your assumptions about your customers are correct by conducting the appropriate research and testing. Testing your concepts early in the development process increases the odds that your launch will be a success.
The benefits of concept testing
The importance of concept testing cannot be overstated. Naturally, we think we know what’s best for our customers. At this stage, concept testing is most critical, even if you are right. You’ll either validate your initial idea or avoid making a risky mistake.
In case you’re not convinced, here are three key benefits of concept testing:
💫 Build new products with confidence
You can speed up the process and show the potential of the work you’ll be undertaking by providing senior leaders or colleagues with direct access to the evidence if your plan requires a lot of input from them. A team is more likely to give you their full support when they are confident.
🤝 Earn your customers’ trust & loyalty
A product or feature’s success (or failure) is always determined by its customers. That’s why it’s essential to test your ideas and concepts before launching them. You will establish effective and successful products based on the insights you gain with concept testing.
You can also use concept testing to get a comprehensive understanding of different aspects of your idea. Concept testing allows you to gain insight into specific features, designs, prices, and many other aspects of your proposal. That way, you can ensure that every detail is accurate before the launch.
⏰ Save your team time (and money)
Taking the time to research and gain insight from your audience will help you make the right decisions since the cost of mistakes could be high. Researchers, managers, and leaders benefit from concept testing because it gives them the specifics and context to make informed decisions.
Choose a concept testing tool that works
There are many ways to conduct concept testing, depending on the amount of time you have, the target audience you want to test with, and whether you must test your concepts verbally or not, amongst other methods and concerns. You can explore several potential solutions to the problem and find the sweet spot for customer satisfaction through concept testing.
However, testing a new concept successfully does come with challenges. To conduct a successful concept test, you need to identify your customer list, contact them, schedule interviews, complete them, and analyze all the feedback you receive.
But it doesn’t have to be complicated. Concept testing is easily achieved with the help of a research platform like Sprig. Concept testing is designed to be effortless as you efficiently recruit testers to integrate right into your design workflow. This approach allows you to iterate on your designs quickly and efficiently.
Here’s how teams routinely save three weeks of development time with asynchronous concept testing – view the case study.
3 ways to make the most out of concept testing
To help you make the most out of concept testing, Product Designer at Sprig, Ben Kolde, shares his three top tips for designers:
- Include an intro screen to your prototype. Whether you’re testing 1 flow or many, having a place that people can land before starting is key to making sure they take the test as intended. It also allows you to easily separate multiple flows.
- Make it easy to start over. Sometimes users find themselves in sticky situations while testing prototypes. Make it easy for them to get started again with a restart or back button.
- Keep it simple. Getting the best results out of your tests is sometimes hard. I’ve found that having people complete multiple simple tasks is always better than 1 large complex task.
Get started with Sprig’s concept testing today
A concept test’s greatest strength is that it benefits everyone involved. It’s a win-win-win situation. Customers get a product they’ll enjoy, designers feel confident that they are creating features and products that will be well-received, and product teams avoid wasting time and money on the wrong ideas.
There are many forms of concept testing, each serving a different purpose. By leveraging the expertise of a trusted innovation partner such as Sprig, you can improve your organization’s innovation processes and maximize resources.
Want to learn more? Join leaders in the user research space by trying Sprig’s concept testing and get valuable user feedback in just days. ■
🎨 Blog illustrations by ls.graphics.
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