Save Time & Money with Concept Testing
A couple of years ago we were working with a client who wanted to add a new feature using geo-targeting to their app. As technology grows, possibilities become realities. And that is really, really exciting. But it can be tempting to run right into the visual design or focus only on market testing or quant measures and not bring in qualitative testing early enough. This is where concept testing comes into play. How do we know — early on in the design process — whether there is a viable use case for a new product or feature? Concept testing and exploratory research are really important. And they can save time, money and a lot of headaches. The now-famous quote from Tom Kelly at IDEO says it all: “If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.”
Many teams I have worked with call UX pretty late in the game. There used to be a lot of confusion between usability testing and user-acceptance testing. While teams are more informed today and most of the time are clear that usability testing or other UX research can be really valuable early on, they still think they need to develop functional prototypes to do testing. No.no.no. I urge teams to start with very low-fidelity prototypes and test the concepts. These can often be storyboards, sketches, or very basic prototypes done in tools like Balsamiq. Users can imagine certain scenarios and with a few sketches talk through tasks and what they would expect to see. This early feedback gets a lot of clarity on the mental model.
So here are a few tips to consider when testing a concept:
1. User profiles are key.
While persona development can be a huge help in product and roadmap development, simple user profiles are a great place to start with concept testing. Who will use this? What are their goals? And who is the primary, secondary, tertiary user? Take a very simple approach to this and look at early adopters (most likely to use this) and frequent users. Do not worry yet about periodic users or those you would hope to convert. Keep the circle small and build out for there in later testing.
2. Task analyses are also key.
Believe it or not, this one simple step often gets overlooked. What are the primary things a primary user would do? Think of the story or scenario. That is what would want to sketch or prototype. Stay at the story level. Do not worry yet about what is under the hood.
3. Do not be afraid to use qualitative testing methods early on.
If you Google concept testing, chances are you will see a few pages of listings from quantitative services before you ever see anything about qualitative UX methods. That is a big mistake. Product development has traditionally held off on qualitative testing until there is a more formally designed product. But Design Thinking principles (thanks again to IDEO for making this user-centered design method a viable brand) are shifting that which is great.
4. Iterative testing is sexy.
OK — that might be a stretch. But this has been a cry of many UXer over the years: Test early! Test often! Build low fidelity prototyping into your project plan. Get the stakeholders to watch testing and see for themselves the value proposition and the true reactions users have to ideas, scenarios, and concepts.
Back to the client who wanted to add geo-targeting to their app. I would love to tell you a huge success story. The truth is we tested a few rounds of ideas and based on that feedback they left that idea on the conference rooms floor. But that is a success story. Because if you measured the cost in time and money of developing a feature no one would use, avoiding that waste is a huge win.
