How to Run a Concept Test
A sneak peek into how we designed our latest passion product
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Do you have a brand new idea for a product or service? Feeling eager to hire designers and developers to bring it to life? Amazing! But before you rush into building your idea, let me introduce you to a little something that could save you lots of time and money down the road: Concept Testing!
Concept Testing is a research method we use at 55 Minutes to get early feedback about a product concept directly from the people whose problem we are trying to solve. Depending on your product, it could involve letting your target customers try a prototype of your concept or simply sharing a presentation about how it would work. Here’s why you should consider running a concept test before you build your product:
- Validate your solution with your target customer
A concept test will help you find out whether or not your target customers would ultimately want to use your product. They’ll be able to tell you what works, what doesn’t, and why! - Save time and money
It can be extremely costly to pivot your product after designing and developing it. Testing early can help you identify any issues with your idea before investing time and money in design and development. - Uncover new needs your product can solve
One of the key values of concept testing is simply getting other perspectives. By seeing your idea, test participants can sometimes offer suggestions for features that you may not have thought of! - Narrow down which idea you want to focus on
Another scenario where concept testing can be extremely valuable is when you have multiple ideas for a solution, but aren’t sure which one has the most potential. When you are between many ideas, a concept test can help you figure out which idea best fits the needs of your audience.
How to Run a Concept Test
Running a concept test sounds simple enough, but there are many tasks required to ensure it runs smoothly. Here’s a quick overview of the typical process and key questions you’ll want to ask:
If you’re running a lean team, you can engage a research and design consultant to help you set up and run the test. But if you’re interested in running it on your own, allow me to share what we learned from concept testing our latest in-house product idea.
To tackle the issue of social isolation that many remote workers have been experiencing since the pandemic (especially those who joined new companies while working remotely), our team came up with a “conversation game” to help coworkers build relationships and a sense of belonging in their organizations. Here are three key tips that we picked up while running a concept test to validate our solution.
Tip 1: Define your concept test objectives, build your Minimum Viable Product
You don’t have to build your whole product to test it! Instead, focus on designing the core features that you want to get feedback on. More often than not, your idea will need to be refined, so testing a low fidelity prototype can help you save time and rework later on.
To illustrate, here’s a look at the prototype we created:
The experience is simple: coworkers take turns choosing a question to ask each other. The conversation flow is designed to help coworkers break the ice, build empathy, and learn how to work better together. As you can see, we use minimal design and styling because our priority is to test the functionality of the product. Our main objectives were to test 1) how useful is the product in helping coworkers get to know each other? 2) would the product work well as a voice experience (without webcams, as we were hoping to help battle screen fatigue)? And 3) how could the product be adopted and used in different teams/organizations? To answer these questions, we focused on only prototyping the actual gameplay experience to show testers, which took less than one month!
Tip 2: Simulate your product experience as realistically as possible
While you don’t want to spend too much time beautifying your concept at this stage, it is important to capture the overall experience you want to create for your customers. The more realistic the experience is for the tester, the more accurate their feedback will be.
For example, if your product is a mobile app, let them test it on their phones instead of on a computer or through a shared screen. If your product is meant to be used in a specific context, like a digital mall directory, get them to try it out in the mall. If the content is a core part of your product, like a restaurant review site, use real restaurants and locations instead of placeholder content!
Since we wanted to test if our concept could work as a voice call rather than a video call, we invited our test participants to a Zoom meeting, and asked them to turn off their webcams during the test. By doing this, participants were able to point out that, while they appreciated the safety and comfort of a voice call, they weren’t able to express themselves fully without body language and facial expressions. This gave us a clear direction to let users choose how they use the product–using voice or video.
Tip 3: Recruit potential early adopters to test your concept
To make sure you get the best possible feedback, recruit people who are actually experiencing the problem you are trying to solve! The more pressing the issue is to them, the more invested they will be in helping you improve the solution. To get raw, unbiased feedback, make sure they don’t have any prior knowledge about your concept before the test.
For our product, we asked ourselves, who would benefit the most from this product? Based on our previous research, we knew that new hires who were onboarded to remote teams faced particular difficulty in building a sense of belonging. Additionally, we knew that organizations that value company culture and employee engagement would be more likely to use our product, so we reached out to managers fitting our target company profile and asked them to help us recruit a new hire along with a tenured employee from their team. This ensured that the two participants had a real stake in the test, since they actually worked together.
I hope these tips help you on your journey to create an amazing product. Remember that creating a product is an iterative process, so don’t be discouraged if you find you need to make some changes after concept testing. It’s all part of the process. If you have any questions about concept testing, research or design, drop us a line at hello@55mins.com.
Luke leads UX design at 55 Minutes. He is an enabler who helps an awesome team of researchers and designers deliver top-notch work that is laser-focused on solving for real people. Luke has a background in designing government digital services, eCommerce platforms, and even physical products. He is a big believer in good vibes and is energized by projects that make people’s lives better.
