Building new products and experiences that users love is critical for every organization’s success. But how do they know what will work and what doesn’t?

Fortunately, this isn’t a guessing game. Through concept testing, you can understand what your users think of your product idea and get a glimpse of how it could perform in the market.

What is UX Concept Testing?

Often, brands get feedback from customers after launching their products. In the case of a bad product, this could lead to negative customer feedback and loss of time and revenue. It’s important to keep users happy with your products and experiences constantly. In fact, 32% of customers would stop doing business with a brand after just ONE bad experience – even if they loved the brand.

With UX concept testing, you can get a sense of how users will react during the product development stage to make the necessary changes and fine-tune the product. Not only does it minimize costly errors down the line, but it also helps provide insights on further additions that can make the user journey more seamless.  

A number of companies use concept testing to validate their products. For example, Instagram recently tested out a repost feature to allow users to share others’ content on their feeds. This is not the first time – they have constantly been testing changes to their app to see what users want. While some have worked (and some haven’t), they’ve been continuously interacting with users to see what they need, collecting information that could be useful to them in the future. That brings us to the cardinal rule of UX concept testing – do it as often as possible at every critical stage.

Why Should You Do UX Concept Testing?

Concept testing is all about finding the most successful product-market fit and fine-tuning it so that it is successful once it launches in the market. Here are some specific ways it can help you:

Builds More Trust in Your Idea

Sometimes, you might come up with a great idea – but might find it difficult to convince others that it could work. With concept testing, you can gauge the value of your idea and how customers react to it, allowing you to pitch your idea with confidence to your peers and the management!

Allows You to Identify Opportunities and Problems before Investing Money

Of course, you want your product to succeed – but the best part of UX Concept testing is that even if your product idea fails, it’s still valuable because of the lessons you can take away from it. If you conduct the concept testing process at an early enough stage, you can still get the insights you need to change the product and make it viable for the market.

Similarly, you can also identify hidden opportunities in your product during UX concept testing. Let’s say that your product works quite well with the audience, but you’ve discovered that it would perform much better with an addition. This would be the best chance for you to make these changes and improve your product.

Helps You Prioritize Your Ideas

Companies often have multiple ideas in the pipeline – but the budget to only develop very few at a time. If you’re working on a couple of ideas you want to develop, concept testing is the best way to identify the clear winners and prioritize them. Through UX concept testing, you can see which ideas the users are responding to the best and then rank them in order of priority.

Helps Provide Insights into Your Marketing Strategy

Concept testing is not just about improving the UX of the product – it can also reveal useful insights to market the product. Through UX concept testing, you can validate the kind of messaging that appeals to your users and the channels that would work best. Understanding this at an early stage can help you launch your product successfully.

When Should You Do UX Concept Testing?

Concept testing can be done in multiple stages of UX development – from the ideation and prototyping stage to the product launch phase, and even after. Let’s take a look at how it works during each of these phases.

UX Concept Testing Process

Here’s what your UX concept testing process should ideally cover:

Identify Your Goals and Target Audience

Start by getting inputs from all relevant stakeholders on the objective of the survey, such as the survey parameters and the type of testing that needs to be done and the goal you want to accomplish.

Try to define a target goal for your survey. It might not be enough to just know if your users ‘like’ your product. You want them to offer their opinions on WHAT works, and WHY it works/doesn’t work so that you can take the learnings and apply them to future products. Make sure your survey goal represents that.

Recruiting Users

Once you know the goal of the survey, the next step is to recruit the right users to get feedback. Ideally, these people should closely resemble the end users in terms of demographic or behavior traits. You can also look at choosing users of your current products or of your competitors so that they are able to give more pointed feedback. Design a robust screening survey to ensure that you get your intended users to test on. With Affect UX, you can choose from over 60 million + users across 120 countries to arrive at your ideal user list.

Create the Survey Questions

Creating a survey is not just about giving the user questions and tasks to answer. It is important to make the user comfortable enough so that they reveal their true motivations and thoughts over the course of the survey. To do that, you can create some warm-up questions to get them familiar with your test or product.

When creating the questions, you want to make sure you get honest feedback and responses. To do that, avoid asking leading questions – such as ‘Do you like design A more than B?’ - which can lead to biased responses. Also, make sure that any questions you create allow for explanation and are not simple ‘yes or no’ questions. If you are creating a test for the users, make sure that the question is worded clearly, and in the simplest language possible so that they understand exactly what must be done.

Conduct the Survey and Analyze the Data

After one dry run to iron out any issues, conduct your survey as planned. The most important step after you conduct the survey is to analyze the data you’ve collected. One way to find deep insights is to try to find patterns within the users’ responses or organize them according to various categories.

However, doing this the traditional way may be time-consuming. The Affect UX platform allows you to do UX concept testing and provides reports of the results, divided into multiple categories. This can help you arrive at actionable insights faster.

You can test out your ideas, identify flaws and opportunities, and fine-tune your product before it hits the market. However, it’s not just another UX research platform. We also offer behavioral insights through our Facial Coding and Eye Tracking technologies, which help you get deeper, faster, and unbiased insights from your users. This can help you build a more intuitive product that aligns with what users really want.

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