Concept testing: what it is and why it matters

Imagine you’re in the midst of a long-awaited rebrand, and your graphic designer has just sent you two logo options to review. 

If you don’t decide soon, you’ll throw the entire project off its timeline. And it’s too important to just go with your gut, but you don’t have time to plan and run an A/B test. 

Your best bet? Concept testing.

When you have an idea for a new product feature or a potential ad campaign, you need to run it by real users to ensure they’re on board first—and get input about improving it. This guide explains what concept testing is, why it matters, and how you can use it to ensure your next big project resonates with its audience. 

What is concept testing? 

Concept testing is a method of evaluating early-stage product, service, campaign, or project ideas. The goal is to determine whether a concept is viable and gather customer feedback to improve it. 

The concept testing process involves presenting a prototype of your idea to participants, then asking them questions about it via a survey, 1:1 interview, or focus group.

By testing your concept with actual users, you gain insights into their needs and preferences early in the process when you can still make adjustments.

Contentsquare offers a variety of surveys, including a concept testing option, for you to gather early-stage product feedback

Concept testing vs. usability testing

Concept testing and usability testing are two distinct methods of evaluating products, services, or designs.

Concept testing is a user testing method that happens earlier in the process, right after ideation. At this point, you’ve typically produced a few variations of your idea—say, 2 or 3 ad creative mock-ups or packaging design options—and you want to run them by your target audience to see how well your product or feature meets their needs. 

Usability testing can occur at any point in the development process but typically happens once you have a fully functional product or website. Users attempt to complete certain tasks, revealing bugs or blockers that prevent a positive customer experience. For example, watching session replays, which show real users’ cursor movements and clicks, is an easy usability testing method.

Contentsquare’s Session Replays tool lets you watch playbacks of user sessions on your product

🚨 The bottom line: concept testing assesses user reactions to an initial idea; usability testing focuses on evaluating the user experience of a product or service. 💡 Pro tip: take a pulse check on new concepts with a survey. 

One of the best ways to gauge how users feel about a new product, feature, or design is to survey them. Contentsquare (that’s us 👋) makes it quick and easy to build and launch surveys. To get started, either choose from a collection of customizable templates, or use the in-built AI to write the perfect questions for you.

The reactions feature lets you add a quick rating question to your surveys, illustrated with smileys, emojis, or stars to make them more visually engaging. Each icon connects to a numerical rating, creating quantitative data points that are easy to analyze.

The reactions feature in Contentsquare Surveys lets you create visually engaging questions that concept testers want to complete

4 ways concept testing helps digital businesses

Concept testing allows you to test ideas with real users before you go all in on developing them. You gain crucial data to help you determine the direction of a project—and find more success with your customer base.

Conducting concept tests with your target audience helps you: 

1. Build strong customer relationships

Involving users early in the design and development process shows them you value their opinion. As they express their likes and dislikes, pain points, and preferences, you can incorporate their user feedback to strengthen your product or website. 

When customers see that you genuinely listen to them and make changes based on their opinions to improve the user experience, you boost brand loyalty and trust. This leads to happier, more engaged customers—and, eventually, more sales.

2. Create a user-centric product

The success or failure of any project hinges on how users react to it. Your product or website might have the sleekest user interface (UI) design, but your users will jump ship if they find the messaging or concept off-putting. 

Testing new designs gives you an idea of how users will perceive them. Instead of launching your brand-new product design to a lackluster welcome from your users—or, worse, no welcome at all—you can identify those insights well ahead of time and make refinements. 

Ultimately, this means you’ll create a better, more satisfying product that users enjoy, increasing customer satisfaction, product adoption, and retention.

3. Save time and resources

If you’ve never tried concept testing before, it may feel like an added step to your product backlog. But concept testing actually saves you time, energy, and costs in the long run. 

By running concept tests, you give your users a chance to identify blockers long before you invest in a full-scale design and development project. Asking users what changes they want to see and implementing them early in the process means you won't need to backpedal and make updates later.

4. Increase buy-in

No one wants their ideas to fall flat in front of company leadership, investors, or colleagues. With data on your side, stakeholders are more likely to get on board with product decisions and approve proposed budgets.

Initial data suggesting most users are excited about a new product feature enables you to present your ideas with confidence and increase team alignment. When executives and team members see the value of your project for your customer base, they’ll give you more support and increase their efforts to get it to market.

4 concept testing methods

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to concept testing. Depending on your project and goals, you may opt for one of these 4 types of concept testing methods:

1. Monadic testing splits your test participants into multiple user segments. You show each group a single concept and ask for in-depth feedback on it. For example, you might split participants into three groups, asking Group #1 about one product packaging idea, Group #2 about another, and Group #3 about your current packaging. 

2. Sequential monadic testing also splits participants into groups and shows them one concept at a time. With this method, each group gives feedback on each concept in a random order, but never directly compares them.

3. Comparative testing asks testers to evaluate specific features of two or more concepts at the same time. Sometimes, they have to rate these features for each prototype; other times, they choose the best option.

4. Protomonadic testing is a combination of sequential monadic and comparative testing. Testing groups evaluate each concept separately, and then compare them and select a winner at the end.

5 steps to effective concept testing

Once you’ve developed your concepts, it’s time to start testing. Follow these 5 steps to successfully complete the concept testing process:

1. Set concept testing goals 

First, decide what you want to achieve with the concept test:

• Are you trying to figure out how to optimize your idea? 

• Do you need data on how many users would adopt a new feature, like a search bar? 

• Are you hoping to choose the best of 3 existing design options? 

Setting goals helps you choose a concept testing method, so you can determine the right questions to ask your users, which leads us to the next step.

2. Develop questions 

Based on your goals, brainstorm a list of questions to ask your users—then cut that list down to the top 3. Some questions to get you started include: 

• What’s your first reaction to this prototype? 

• On a 5-point Likert scale, how likely are you to adopt this new feature?

• How would you improve this design?

3. Recruit participants

Find and recruit participants who match your target audience's characteristics, considering demographics, behavioral data, and buyer-readiness level. Depending on your goal and your chosen method of concept testing, you may only need a handful of participants—or more than 100 for a large-scale study.

Find test participants with ease 

Contentsquare’s Interviews tool streamlines the process of getting users on a 1:1 call to discuss your concept. Use it to easily invite your existing users, or to connect with a demographically diverse pool of 200k+ testers on the platform itself. 

Interviews lets you

• Find users in your target audience to get the most helpful feedback

• Automate recruiting, scheduling, and hosting for a stress-free experience

• Compensate testers easily to reduce no-shows

• Record and transcribe conversations to share with team members

You can can even easily share key insights from user interviews with your team by creating highlight clips of key moments and leaving comments on the video timeline. Validating your ideas against user opinions just got easier! 

Contentsquare’s Interviews lets you automate the user research process, testing hypotheses and prototypes with real users

4. Conduct the concept test and analyze your results

If you’re running offline concept testing interviews with a group of people, separate your participants into smaller sub-groups and present your prototype. Include a brief description with any necessary context. After viewing the mock-up and description, testers will answer your questions through surveys or interviews.

At the end of the test, analyze your results, compiling quantitative data—concrete numbers—into charts or graphs and using qualitative data analysis methods to analyze text-based commentary and quotes.

💡 Pro tip: use AI to analyze open-ended survey responses.

Reading through survey responses can be extremely helpful for understanding how users see your concept in their own words. If you’ve got hundreds or thousands, however, you may lose sight of the big picture. You might read a handful of interesting responses and assume they’re representative of the whole group—whether or not they are. Contentsquare’s AI survey analysis removes human bias from survey data analysis. It tags your responses for sentiment, showing you whether they have an overall positive, neutral or negative tone. It also automatically tags responses into key themes, revealing any areas where lots of your customers share the same perspective. 

Running sentiment analysis on survey responses is a powerful way of cutting through the noise and identifying whether your concept resonates or not 

5. Identify and optimize the most promising concept

Use your data to choose one high-potential concept for further development. Based on the insights you gained from users during concept testing, keep iterating to improve your idea and ensure it's aligned with customer needs and preferences.

Even if your prototypes received top scores from real users in concept tests, seek feedback in multiple ways. For example, you can:

• Launch user satisfaction surveys like Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys

• Install feedback widgets to get input on a website page, where users can highlight what they like or dislike

• Run unmoderated user tests on your prototypes and see if your customers find your product as easy to use as you’d anticipated 

Get started with concept testing

You don’t have to worry about taking your best guess or following through on a hunch when creating new products or designs anymore. With concept testing, you have a roadmap for collecting actionable data about what works for your customers—and what doesn’t. 

By understanding customer perspectives and reactions, you discover how to optimize your ideas to create irresistible products and satisfying experiences.

FAQs about concept testing