How can you test the demand for your product before building it?
By: Simon Wesierski
Tags: Startup, User Experience, Product Design, Business, Product Management

Create a survey

Surveys can contain two types of questions:

Closed (quantitative data): Multi-choice questions give a better response rate, and it’s easier to process and visualize the resulting data. A respondent has a choice from radio buttons or checkboxes.

Open (qualitative data): These questions require a text answer to explain the cause. Always try to ask, “why or why not?’ to dig deeper into the problem.

What is great about online surveys is that people feel anonymous, which leads to them being very honest and straightforward. Remember that open questions give lower response rates, so you want to make sure every question is essential and none are “nice to have” questions.

Recommended tools:

Build a prototype

“The key principle in lean methods is to reduce waste, and one of the biggest forms of waste is to design, build, test and deploy a feature or product only to find out it is not what we needed.”

Your fundamental goal should be to learn something at a much lower cost in terms of money and time through building a real product. Here’s what I love about prototyping:

Making sure as soon as possible that everyone in the team has a consistent vision of the product.

A remarkable tool to communicate between different departments like marketing, design, development, C-level.

Ability to gather quick feedback from your target customers (you can read more about creating UX personas).

Having a pretty solid foundation for the development documentation.

High fidelity mockups are deliverables from designers to front-end developers.

In EFEKT- UX/UI studio, we use Invision to create clickable prototypes. It’s a great way to link screens and create user flows, which we might test with end-users or a customer. There are numerous tools that you can use to create your first sketches. From the very simple like Balsamiq, Whismical to more advanced software like Sketch or Figma, where you create a User Interface as well. Many people don’t appreciate pen and paper which is super efficient at explaining your ideas with a team. In our UX workshops or internal meetings, we love to use quick sketches to facilitate valuable discussion about many different solutions.

From low to high fidelity

In-depth user testing

There is no question that talking and testing with the possible target group is one of the most powerful sources of inspiration for many breakthrough product ideas. In every user or customer interaction, it’s good to understand:

Are your customers who you think they are?

Do they really have the problems you think they have?

How does the customer solve this problem today?

What would be required for them to switch?

When we were creating our first startup, Wooby (coloring books enhanced with Augmented Reality), we wanted to face our very first skeleton with users. We defined our target group as three — seven-year-old kids. Where could we find them? The highest density of our users per square meter is available in kindergartens, so I reached out to one of them and asked the principal if we could run a free, creative lesson. I explained simply that a kid can color an animal, then we provide a smartphone with a mobile application, and they can see their animal in 3D with the same colors as were used on the paper. Magic!