Concept Testing in UX - How to Do It Right Every Time

Concept testing is the secret to developing successful products. Think of it as a litmus test for the viability of a product or a service long before it hits the shelves.

UX concept testing helps you collect data and guides your designs using meaningful information.

In this guide, we’ll explain why concept testing matters and explain the steps to designing a concept testing survey. We’ll also share some tips on how to find the right tool to help you with your testing.

But how do you quickly turn your scattered user feedback into impactful product decisions?

Marvin, our AI qualitative data analysis tool, streamlines concept testing by making it easy to organize complex user feedback with unmatched clarity. This allows you to uncover patterns and unmet customer needs in seconds and build what users want.

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What Is Concept Testing in UX?

UX concept testing is a research method that involves asking potential customers about your ideas for a product before you launch it. It helps you identify issues, users’ preferences, and motivations to make your products better for the users.

To understand the process, let’s look at the various stages in the product development process where you can apply concept testing:

• Early stage: Testing the viability of raw ideas
• Mid-stage: Refining and comparing design variations
• Pre-launch: Validating and confirming the final concept

Let’s also quickly list techniques used in concept testing:

1. Surveys: It’s a cost-effective and popular method for asking users questions to collect structured feedback and quantitative data.
2. Heatmaps: Analyze where your users scroll, click, and interact with the most.
3. A/B Testing: Ideal to test different versions of a concept and see which one works better. 
4. Usability Testing: See how users interact with a product or an interface.
5. Event Analysis: Track how your audience reacts when interacting with specific product features and where they drop off.

Concept Testing vs. Usability Testing

Although closely related, these two have distinct product development roles, goals, and methods.

Let’s take a closer look at them:

<figure class="wp-block-table"><table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>Aspect</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>Concept Testing</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>Usability Testing</strong></td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>Purpose</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Validate new ideas, their potential, and their appeal in the market</td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Test the functionality and user experience</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>When It’s Ideal</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Early stage when validating ideas, validating prototypes, and near pre-launch&nbsp;</td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Often done during or after the design phase</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>Focus</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Testing customer interest, reactions to features</td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Understanding the usability and efficiency of a product interface</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center"><strong>Example</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Testing whether a budget and expense budgeting app resonates with potential users</td><td class="has-text-align-center" data-align="center">Observe how users interact with a high-fidelity prototype of an app and identify their issues when navigating and completing a task</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>

Why Concept Testing Matters in UX Research?

Concept testing acts as a safety net. It allows your team to present features, ideas, and prototypes to your audience and gather feedback before developing a product.

Let’s explore the top 5 reasons not to skip concept testing:

1. Get Early User Feedback: Concept testing lets you directly interact with users to understand their pain points and motivations. This feedback contributes to your customers' overall satisfaction and user experience.
2. Reduces Risks: Early testing allows you to identify potential flaws and areas where your concept doesn’t align with the market. This minimizes the risk of the product failing to meet market needs and necessitating costly redesigns later.
3. Validates Your Ideas: You can test assumptions early in the design process. It can also gauge users' willingness to purchase a product, guiding decisions in product development.
4. Supports an Iterative Design Process: Concept testing allows continuous engagement with the target audience and enhances concepts, resulting in a polished, intuitive final product.
5. Allows Creating User-Centric Products: By involving users early on, your UX team can create UX products that are functional, exciting, and align with users’ expectations.

Tips to Run Effective Concept Testing for UX Projects

This section provides the 5 top tips to capture feedback that can significantly influence your product development effectively:

1. Pick the Right Methodology: You should choose the appropriate testing method, whether surveys, heatmaps, A/B tests, card sorting, or usability testing, based on your specific needs, budget, time, and the nature of your concept.
2. Write Effective Questions: Develop clear, concise, and unbiased questions to obtain relevant participant insights. Avoid leading questions that prompt the respondents to answer how you want.
3. Engage Multiple Teams: You should involve all teams in your organization, including design, development, and marketing, to gain a comprehensive perspective and improve product quality.
4. Give Respondents the Context of Your Concept: Provide adequate information about your concept to help your participants understand the problem it solves and the intended use. That way, you can get accurate and valuable feedback.
5. Use AI Tools to Get Meaningful Insights: Leverage automated tools to quickly get insights from your data, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. For example, AI tools feature smart workflows to make your concept testing strategic and impactful.

How to Build a Concept Testing Survey That Yields Actionable Insights

Surveys are an excellent way to run concept tests, but require careful planning and execution to get actionable insights.

Below are the 5 steps to follow:

Step 1: Set Clear Goals

Before creating the survey, outline what you and your team want to learn. A clearly defined goal guides you when creating survey questions. 

You should also consider a SMART framework to set clear, actionable, measurable goals. For example, your goal might be to find the best design. Keep in mind, your goals should:

• Focus on addressing your users’ pain points
• Match your overall organization’s goals

Step 2: Define Your User Persona

The next step in the concept testing blueprint is defining your target audience. 

Focus on those likely to interact with your concept to ensure your feedback is relevant. The right audience will also ensure your findings are credible and inform your product development.

Here is how you can do this:

• Segment potential respondents based on demographics, pain points, behavior, and motivations
• Tailor your questions with their needs and preferences in mind

For example, your user persona might be between 28 and 40 years old, of any gender, a mid-level professional, tech-savvy, and using tools like Slack daily.

Step 3: Choose a Test Platform

After understanding your target audience, you should choose software that matches your project. Check if:

• It lets you filter and recruit the right participants
• It is easy to use, allowing you to schedule surveys, invite respondents, and allocate incentives
• It can support monadic, comparative, sequential monadic, or protomonadic survey testing methods

Some top UX survey tools are SurveyMonkey, SurveySparrow, and Userpilot. These tools allow you to access a diverse pool of respondents, design interactive surveys, and get real-time feedback.

Step 4: Design Your Survey Questions

The first step to creating practical survey questions is to mix open-ended and closed-ended questions to capture a broader range of feedback.

You should also incorporate a multiple-choice question to get straightforward, quantifiable data. Use the Likert scale with rating and ranking questions to measure attitudes and opinions.

To make sure your questions are not biased and overwhelming, these are some of the factors you should consider:

• Do multiple-choice questions generate confusion instead of clarity?
• Do you want to provide other options?

Step 5: Conduct Tests and Analyze the Results

Now, it’s time to carry out your concept testing with the participants you’ve selected. Run your survey long enough to collect a statistically significant number of responses. Once the testing ends, analyze the data in relation to your initial goals and KPIs.

Does analyzing your concept testing surveys sound like a lot? Don’t stress.

Marvin automatically pulls data from surveys and feeds valuable user insights across your team so they can collaborate effortlessly and act on winning concepts.

Ready to accelerate your UX concept testing with AI? Request a demo to learn how to extract insights from your survey responses and refine your designs based on the feedback.

How to Choose Concept Testing Tools That Fit Your Workflow

Picking the right concept testing tool is key. However, consider several factors we’ll highlight below to determine which one is best for you.

Below, we have a step-by-step process to make the process easier for you:

1. Define Your Concept Testing Goals

Different concept testing tools serve various purposes. The first step is to understand the type of testing you’ll run and the data you want to collect. For example, one software might excel in A/B testing and another in prototype testing.

Have clear objectives, whether you want to validate an idea or compare different feature sets. Whatever the case, choose a tool that supports those needs.

2. Assess Its Recruiting Capabilities

Recruiting the right audience is often time-consuming. Your chosen tool should offer built-in participant pools, allowing you to find, screen, and vet the respondents to ensure you get meaningful conclusions.

UserTesting is an example of software you can use to find participants and gather data through recorded sessions.

3. Check the Ease of Setup and Use

Use free trials and demos to get hands-on experience with a tool. Pay attention to the set-up time, the ease of navigation through its features, and whether it requires a steep learning curve.

Check if it provides responsive customer support and offers resources like tutorials and videos to help you succeed in concept testing.

4. Match the Features to Your Needs

Opt for a concept testing tool with many features specifically designed to meet your workflow requirements.

For example, if you’re looking for research collaborative software, the platform should fit seamlessly with your existing workflow. It should allow role-based access and support real-time data viewing, editing, and commenting.

5. Consider Real Time Reporting

A good concept testing tool should offer instant insights, minimizing the time between testing and launching your products. It should also easily monitor responses as they roll in to predict your customers' success and make the necessary decisions promptly.

6. Look for Scalability

If you’re starting small but plan to expand, pick a software with advanced features to meet your enterprise-level testing needs. 

It should also provide smooth performance and access to many participants. Your software should scale with your increasing team, handle complex projects, and securely manage user data.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Got more concept testing questions? Let’s quickly answer the commonly asked ones below:

What Is the Difference Between Concept Testing and Concept Evaluation?

Here are the quick differences when it comes to concept testing vs. concept evaluation:

• Concept testing aims to understand user reaction to a concept, while concept evaluation analyzes the value of a concept.
• Concept testing is mainly conducted in the early stages of the design process, while concept evaluation is often performed in the mid- to late stages before the final product is launched.
• Concept testing focuses on a product's desirability, clarity, and relevance, while concept evaluation focuses on the viability and alignment of a concept with your goals.

What Are Some Common Concept Testing Methods?

The most common methods of concept testing are:

1. Monadic Testing: Each participant sees only one concept at a time and evaluates it independently.
2. Sequential Monadic Testing: Each user sees multiple concepts but evaluates each separately.
3. Comparative Testing: Users see two or more concepts side-by-side, compare them, and choose the one they favor over the other.
4. Proto-monadic Testing: Each user evaluates each concept independently, then chooses the one they prefer.

What Is the Goal of Testing Concepts in Early Product Design?

Testing concepts early lets you:

• Validate your ideas
• Find and fix defects early
• Gather user-centric insights

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap!

Concept testing will allow your team to iterate rapidly, reduce risks, and create products that resonate with your users. Follow the steps and tips we’ve discussed to ensure your surveys give you meaningful insights.

Remember, the right testing tool can significantly impact your process and the overall quality of your designs. 

So, choosing a concept testing tool should fit your project’s needs and allow for scalability. Your software should also have integration and reporting features.

If you want to make your concept testing effortless, use our AI research tool.

Marvin consolidates all your insights in one platform so they are readily available throughout your organization, enabling you to build and refine designs quickly.

Sign up for a free account and validate every UX concept with data-driven insights.