7 concept testing surveys (with templates) to unlock your next big idea

Are you confident your proposed mobile app, product redesign, or marketing campaign will appeal to your target audience? You may be too close to the situation to notice biases or blockers. So, take a step back and let your intended users validate your idea or concept.

Concept testing surveys are a simple way to gather direct feedback from potential users, letting you gauge their feelings about new concepts by showing them your mockup and asking questions about it. There are multiple ways to execute the ‘asking’ part, but a concept testing survey does the job quickly and effectively. 

But to get actionable results, you need to launch the right type of concept testing survey for your needs. Here are 7 templates for a variety of use cases to get you started on the right foot.  

7 concept testing survey types

Try Contentsquare Surveys to collect reliable insights from your target audience before diving into product development mode. Our drag-and-drop interface and comprehensive survey template library let you build customized surveys, quickly and easily. If none of the templates fit your needs, there’s an AI tool that’ll generate custom survey questions in a matter of seconds. 

Explore our 7 survey templates and find the one you need to jumpstart your concept testing efforts.

1. Concept test

A concept test survey enables you to collect insights ahead of a new product, design, or campaign launch. There’s a specific template for this in Contentsquare’s survey template library. 

You should send out a concept testing survey after you’ve conducted market research and created a wireframe or detailed plan, but before the team develops your concept for launch, so you have time to take any helpful feedback you receive onboard. For more advice, check out our step-by-step guide to concept testing.

To get started, use our concept test survey, tailoring the elements to your needs. Ask about things like:

• The product’s or design’s appeal

• Its relevance to your target market

• Its usefulness and practicality in their daily lives

Pique people’s interest and make the survey more enjoyable by adding a rendering of your new product or design. The closer it is to reality, the better. Note: our template lets you upload JPG, PNG, GIF, or WebP files.

You can add images and gifs to your surveys

You can also ask survey respondents to rate what they’ve seen through the Reactions feature. This refers to a selection of icons that express feelings about a question: buddies, smileys, emojis, or stars. These labels connect to ratings or scores, allowing you to gather quantitative data for your analysis.

Let your respondents express themselves with stars, smileys, emojis, or ‘buddies’—Contentsquare’s own reactions, which are pictured here

2. Preference test

This survey focuses on the visual aspect of your product, app, or site. It involves sharing 2 to 3 designs with users to understand which they like best and why. 

A basic preference test follows a couple of steps:

• First, ask the participants to pick their top choice among the variants

Begin with a radio button—a question that requires only 1 answer out of 2 or more options

Next, dig deeper with follow-up questions, such as What were your impressions of each design? or Why did you prefer this one over the others?

Follow it up with a question that triggers a ‘long text answer’

This survey, sent out early in the design phase, shows you how users perceive your brand and what they feel about certain design elements, giving you insights that will steer you in the right direction.

Consult these user preferences when planning various design aspects, from layouts and color schemes to fonts and icons. This way, you can avoid spending time, energy, and money on concepts that don’t appeal to your audience.

💡 Pro tip: a preference test survey is a great option when you’d like to A/B test an idea, but don’t have the time. That’s because the principle is similar: both methodologies allow you to offer your audience two versions of the same concept, and see which one they respond to best. 

 You could, for example, use Contentsquare's preference test survey to A/B test your logo designs ahead of a rebrand

3. Design satisfaction survey

Understand how users feel about your mockup with a design satisfaction survey. A good design should be engaging, trustworthy, and clear in its message—this survey template helps you gauge how well your designs achieve these goals. Use it to glean insights into your user experience (UX) that you can apply in your next iteration.

Create a survey that complements your user experience

Edit any Contentsquare survey to suit your app or website. Specifically, you can choose how your survey appears to users as part of a seamless UX.

1. Pop-over: a small widget usually appearing at the bottom of the page, allowing users to answer the survey without exiting or disrupting their current activity

2. Button: a small button on your page that visitors click to open the survey, prompting users to participate without being intrusive

3. Bubble: a small circle that appears to users like a friendly chat icon, in the bottom right of your page 

4. Embedded: a survey that sits in between your site content in the same way an image or video might, so that users have the option to interact or scroll past 

5. Full screen: displayed in the middle of the page as an overlay, while the rest of the page is grayed out to draw the user's attention to the survey

6. Link: when your survey exists outside your website, Contentsquare generates a unique URL. Share this link with users through targeted email messages or promote it with a pop-up invite on your website.

4. Tree testing survey

This UX research method enables you to evaluate the effectiveness of your information architecture. Can users easily find what they’re looking for? Does your navigation hierarchy match the mental models people use to explore your product or site?

Tree testing surfaces navigation issues early in the process, so you’ll know which ones to prioritize during iteration. 

Creating a tree testing survey with Contentsquare couldn’t be easier

5. Content feedback survey

Does your content resonate with readers? Clicks, average time on page, and other quantitative data can tell you what’s happening on your website—but not the reason behind it.

Let users tell you what they think and feel about your content: whether they find your blog articles, product guides, or landing page snippets relevant and of high quality. Learn why they love your content, or what they believe is missing in your current messaging. Then, use their feedback to inform your content planning and choose appropriate topics, tone, and formats.

A content feedback survey made with a Contentsquare template 

6. Feature prioritization survey 

Concept testing is a useful way to ensure your product roadmap aligns with your users’ desires and expectations. This survey template asks users which of your upcoming features they’d like to see next, how important they are, and whether they’re open to a longer discussion—a 1:1 user interview—if you have follow-up questions. 

This numerical rating scale will give you a quantitative answer to the question: “Which of our upcoming features do our users actually want?”, thereby ensuring your product team’s time is well-spent. 

7. Beta feedback survey

Perhaps the concept you’d like to validate has gone a little further than the ideation stage, but you’re still unsure how users will feel about it. If you’ve already built a prototype version of your new product or page, then a Beta feedback survey is the way to go. 

The Beta feedback survey template is helpful for when you’d still like to validate a concept, but you’ve already gone some way towards making it come to life 

This 7-question survey template lets you invite users to a new version of your product via a link, and then solicits feedback about their experiences. It asks a mix of open and closed questions, so you’ll gather both quantitative and qualitative data: things like how they’d score your new digital experience out of 10 and their written explanation for their score. 

💡Pro tip: analyze qualitative survey data easily with Contentsquare’s AI tools. If there’s a lot of traffic to your website, you might collect thousands—or even tens of thousands—of responses. This can make analyzing open-ended feedback a laborious task: are you really going to read every single one? Use Contentsquare’s AI technology to speed up the process of turning users’ open-text answers into actionable insights. Features include:

• Sentiment analysis, which assesses whether the overall tone of a response is positive, neutral or negative 

• Automatic tagging that labels your responses with the themes users discuss. You can add your own tags or allow AI to identify key ideas for you.  

• An automated survey summary that creates a report of your survey, including key takeaways, interesting quotes, and suggestions for your next steps 

Contentsquare’s AI features help you turn your survey data into actionable insights quickly and easily  

5 tips and tactics to create a successful concept test survey

As you become familiar with the survey templates shared above, it’s crucial to build the habit of following best practices. Remember that the techniques you’ll learn during concept testing will also come in handy when you conduct user testing down the line. 

So, here are a few tips and tricks to ensure your concept testing survey hits the mark:

1. Focus on creating a clear flow that engages your audience. Start with a straightforward introduction that explains your motives for launching a survey. 

2. Keep your surveys short and sweet. A HubSpot poll found that the ideal length for a questionnaire is 10 to 14 minutes, and most consumers are willing to answer between 7 and 10 questions.

3. Ask a blend of open and closed-ended questions (as we demonstrated earlier) for a balanced survey. Closed-ended questions (like the Likert scale), where you can choose only one answer, are easy to analyze and simple and intuitive for participants. On the other hand, open-ended questions allow you to capture qualitative data and identify common themes, strengths, and weaknesses. 

4. Use interactive methods to keep users interested. This includes engaging language, prototypes or images, and strategic timing. Remember, concept testing shouldn't feel like work, so aim for an enjoyable experience.

5. Respect your audience's time and energy by using the monadic approach for a single idea, or multiple surveys that explore one idea each

3 reasons to set up a concept testing survey today

1. Pique your audience’s interest. Surveys—particularly the ones in Contentsquare—let you use interactive and engaging methods. Add images or prototypes to keep participants interested during the concept test. Don’t make it seem like hard work!

2. Produce high-quality results. Ask open questions about multiple concepts at once. This allows you to compare and contrast different ideas, homing in on your users’ most preferred aspects. You can then apply these findings to your iterations.

3. Boost brand trust and loyalty. Get your potential customers involved in your product creation or feature update. Show them you value their voice by incorporating their sentiments into the final output, and compel them to trust your brand.

25 questions to ask in a concept testing survey to get you up and running quickly

Now that you've been introduced to multiple concept testing surveys, it's time to draft some product concept questions to help you build a successful product.

To help you get started, here's a list of 25 open- and closed-ended questions.

💡 Pro tip: use AI to write your survey questions 

It’s deceptively fiddly to write the kind of survey questions that will generate truly useful responses. If the examples in the image above aren’t right for your concept test, but you want to ensure you’re using balanced questions, use Contentsquare’s free AI question writing tool. Just enter the goals for your survey to generate clear, unbiased questions that’ll help you achieve them. 

There you have it: multiple Contentsquare surveys to help you test your concepts, validate your product ideas, and capture important insights from your audience. If you need another reason to set up a survey, check out our concept testing examples for more inspiration.

Take advantage of the power of concept testing surveys to set your product, site, campaign, or design up for success. The possibilities are endless when you have the right tools and processes.

FAQs about concept testing surveys