6 steps to conduct a concept test and validate your ideas

Concept testing allows you to validate product, design, and marketing ideas early in the process, minimizing the risk of releasing something that doesn't resonate with your target audience. When you run your ideas by real users, it’s easier to make the right decisions from the get-go, saving time, money, and effort.

This guide takes you through a repeatable 6-step process to conduct successful concept tests—with examples and free survey templates to help you get started.  

Step 1: define what you’re testing and your end goal

Start by clearly defining what you’re testing and why, so you can collect the right data and avoid wasting your audience’s time—and yours! 

When setting your goal, try to go beyond first-order thinking (e.g. “We need to pick a logo idea”). Instead, consider your concept test in relation to wider product or business goals (e.g. “We need a logo that new users trust and remember to grow our net annual recurring revenue”).

Contentsquare’s (free, customizable) concept survey template 

Your concept testing method will depend on the type of test you want to run, for example:

• Logo test: evaluate the effectiveness of a logo (re)design and determine whether it’s recognizable and memorable, and if it conveys the intended message or brand image

• Wireframe usability test: assess a website interface’s usability and identify potential issues before launch

• Preference test: ask people to choose between 2 or more concepts, and explain their preference

• Marketing asset test: identify the copy or visuals that resonate best with your target market

• Naming test: ask users to name a new feature or product, and learn if your name ideas match user expectations

• Pricing test: gauge how existing or potential customers react to different pricing options

💡 Pro tip: testing too many ideas at once confuses users and makes it harder for you to pick a winner. Testing just 1 or 2 concepts at a time helps you collect more explicit feedback and easily analyze results.

Contentsquare’s Preference test survey template allows you to compare how users feel about 2 variations of the same concept 

Step 2: define your target audience and how you’ll reach them

Now that you know what you’re testing and why, ask yourself: “Who is this update for?” This will inform how you go about collecting the right feedback to achieve the goal you set in step 1. 

For example:

• If your goal is to attract new customers, test concepts on potential new customers by triggering an on-site survey for new website visitors

• If your goal is to reduce time to first value (TTFV) for trial users, target your concept test to new trial users by sending them a survey link by email

• If your goal is to launch a new product, first perform market research to find your ideal customer profile. Then, recruit users who match your target demographic and run a concept test interview with a tool like Contentsquare’s Interviews.

A feedback tool like Contentsquare Surveys lets you target who a survey is shown to, based on user attributes (like ‘trial users’ or ‘country’), behavior (like scrolling halfway down a page), URL, and device. This helps you target your concept survey to your preferred user segment and collect more valuable feedback. 

For example, you could target users by subscription type and ask people on your highest-tier plan what they think of a potential new product feature before your team builds it.

Targeting options in Contentsquare Surveys: trigger your concept survey by device, page, user attributes, and behavior

You can also share a survey link via email, social media, or anywhere else your target audience hangs out. This is ideal if you don’t have a website or substantial traffic yet, or if you want to run your test by people who are not yet part of your existing audience. 

💡 Pro tip: even if you have an established product, you may find it beneficial to run concept tests on potential or target users. For example, Clarins, a world-renowned cosmetics company, is still testing its site and iterating based on user feedback to improve it.

“We use a lot of the [Contentsquare] data to make decisions on how we're going to transform our website and roll out new versions of it and what our customers want to see. We do a lot of testing to see what's working and what's not, and we've made a lot of changes because of it.”

Rachel Rosenstock

Associate Manager of Ecommerce Merchandising

Step 3: write a concept testing statement

Once you’ve defined what you’re testing (step 1) and the methods you’ll use to reach your intended audience (step 2), summarize all this information in a simple concept testing statement like this one:

We will test [THING] on [AUDIENCE] by [METHOD] to [GOAL]

For example:

• We will test 2 logo ideas on paying customers by adding a targeted survey to product pages to find the logo existing customers prefer

• We will test a new product feature with a focus group of target customers by conducting in-person user interviews to validate if adding the feature will increase revenue

Creating a concept testing statement is essential for keeping your team aligned and informed before conducting a test. It also helps establish a historical record of your goals, which can be useful when evaluating your results later (see step 6). 

💡 Pro tip: set a time limit or desired number of participants or responses before running a concept testing survey so you know when to stop collecting responses and start analyzing the results.

For example:

• We will test 2 logo ideas on paying customers by running a targeted survey for 2 weeks on product pages to find the logo that existing customers prefer.

• We will test a new product feature with a focus group of 10 target customers by conducting in-person user interviews to validate if adding the feature will result in increased revenue.

Step 4: create a concept testing survey

If you’re using Contentsquare Surveys, choose one of our free survey templates to set up a new concept test. 

Make the template your own by editing the questions and uploading design assets, then target the survey to users on your website or share it via URL. 

Where to find Contentsquare’s free concept testing survey templates

If the questions in the template aren’t quite suitable for your use case, or you’d like to add more, generate new ones with Contentsquare’s AI tool. Using AI for this task removes human error from the equation, so you won’t accidentally write the kind of biased or leading questions that lead to skewed responses.  

Contentsquare’s AI question writing tool crafts the kind of questions that generate meaningful results  

To minimize drop-offs, keep the survey as short and focused as possible—our templates have 2 to 4 questions—and use Survey logic to trigger relevant follow-up questions based on earlier responses. For example, you might ask users who rated a design as ‘poor’: “What would make you increase your rating?”

Use visual aids like images, wireframes, or prototypes to give users a clearer idea of the concepts being tested. If you’re using Contentsquare Surveys, you can add images to any survey question.

💡 Pro tip: if you’re on a Contentsquare plan that doesn’t have access to the survey images feature, you can still paste a link to an externally hosted image or prototype into your survey and direct respondents to view it before coming back to answer more questions.

It will look something like this:

Adding a link to a concept testing question created with Contentsquare Surveys

Step 5: analyze your survey results

Concept testing is not like A/B testing: it involves presenting users with hypothetical situations (e.g. “Would you pay $10/month for this service?”), not measuring real-world website behavior. So, when you analyze your concept testing survey results, you don’t need to achieve statistical significance (a result that’s mathematically likely to be attributable to a specific cause rather than to correlation). 

Focus on quantifying whether target users oppose or support your concept, recording the words and phrases they use to describe their preferences, and ideating any new concepts arising from their feedback. 

Next, generate graphs or percentages for ratings-based questions. If you’re using Contentsquare Surveys, the results of multiple-choice questions automatically show in a chart.

Results of a multiple-choice survey question displayed as a chart, via Contentsquare surveys

If you need to analyze survey data from open-ended questions, Contentsquare’s AI-powered survey tools speed up the process. Use them to run sentiment analysis on your survey responses, and automatically tag the key themes that appear. You can also generate a report: let AI pull out your key findings and quotes, then speculate some next steps. 

Step 6: share and archive your results

Add your concept test results to a UX research repository or wherever your team archives projects. That way, your concept testing work can easily be shared with stakeholders and other teams, giving everyone visibility into your work and its impact on business goals. 

If you’re using Contentsquare Surveys, you can share survey results by downloading them as an editable file, or forwarding responses to email or Slack.

Click the arrow icon (circled, in the top right corner) to share your Contentsquare survey results 

The more tests you run, the more you’ll build an archive of projects you can reuse and iterate on in the future as part of a continuous cycle of product discovery. 

Validate your concepts before they go live

The most valuable opinion about your next product, design, or marketing project isn’t yours: it’s your users’.

Collect feedback on your concepts before you invest time and resources into developing or rolling out updates that don’t resonate with your most valuable segments—start with our free concept testing survey template today. 

FAQs about running concept tests