Top 7 product design testing methods (and how to use them effectively)

You’ve worked tirelessly to create an amazing product and added many features you think users will love, but then you discover that you’ve focused on all the wrong things. Customers don’t find the product user-friendly and it turns out they’d prefer a simple, streamlined experience over the complex feature-packed hierarchies you’ve designed.

Too many teams find themselves scrambling to make big changes to a product after it’s already launched, which is demoralizing, expensive and can cost your users’ trust.  

Use effective product design testing methods to avoid this nightmare. Running tests allows you to reduce your assumptions and truly understand your users—so you can be sure that any product idea you invest in is something they truly want. Here’s our guide to 7 effective testing strategies.

Why testing your product is key to design thinking 

Design thinking is a product design process that helps teams generate creative solutions. It consists of the following 5 stages: 

1. Empathize with users and understand their experiences and desires  

2. Define a problem statement based on what you’ve learned

3. Ideate solutions to the problem 

4. Prototype your product ideas

5. Test your prototypes with user groups to understand what works and what doesn’t

Testing is the last stage of design thinking—the step when you finally show your design to the people it’s intended to serve. This stage is crucial for understanding what your users think and feel about your design, and learning which changes could make it better in their eyes—after all, user empathy is the core principle behind design thinking.  

However, it’s important to remember that design thinking is cyclical: every stage informs the others. You should test your ideas continuously, at every point of the product lifecycle.  

7 product testing methods for successful design

You’ll need to run different types of tests depending on your stage in the product design process and your goals. Here are 7 methods to choose from. 

1. Concept validation

With concept testing, you ask real or potential users to respond to early product design ideas, usually presented as drawings or presentations. It’s a way of checking if your idea resonates with users before you invest heavily in it.

Strengths: 

• Concept validation shows you which ideas won’t work before you’ve spent too much time and money on them

• A positive response boosts your confidence in your design decisions and priorities—and helps you sell your ideas to stakeholders

• It’s an exploratory form of testing, which means it helps you empathize with your users to understand what they want (and don’t want)

Limitations: 

• Since it’s a conceptual form of testing, users don’t engage with a product or prototype, so their responses may be inaccurate 

• If you don’t ask very clear questions and ask users to justify their responses, you’ll get fuzzy results that won’t help you make key decisions

Pro tip: beware of false positives in concept validation testing! Users may feel obliged to respond positively just to make you happy—which skews your testing data. 

2. Usability task analysis

Usability task analysis testing checks whether users can complete key tasks on your product or website without hitches. It involves instructing a group of participants to complete specific actions—for example, an ecommerce app might ask users to find a product, add it to their cart, and check out. Researchers then observe users as they complete the tasks via session replays that track clicks, scrolls, and page movements. 

Strengths: 

• Great for checking whether your product journey is intuitive to real users

• Helps you quickly identify blockers, bugs, and gaps in usability

• Shows you how your users think, move, and navigate, helping you improve the user experience (UX)

Limitations: 

• You often end up with complex results based on particular participants’ end goals and environments—it’s not a quick test you can easily statistically summarize

Since you’re watching real participants in real time as they use the product, it can be time-consuming

Pro tip: Contentsquare’s User Tests streamlines the process of running unmoderated tests on your prototypes. Use it to host test sessions, watch session replays, and ask users questions about the experience afterward. The tool makes it easy to recruit and compensate test-takers: use participants from your own network, or recruit from our pool of 200,000+ users.

Contentsquare’s User Tests tool helps you conduct usability task analyses quickly and easily

3. First-click testing

With first-click testing methods, teams observe users to see where they click first on an interface when trying to complete certain tasks. It involves tracking where users click, how long it took them to do so, and where they clicked next.

Strengths: 

• It’s a good way to check the perceived usefulness of a particular feature 

• It shows you which buttons, icons, and other navigational elements your users are failing to notice or avoiding

• It’s a flexible form of testing: you can run first-click tests on a wireframe, a page of your website, or your final product

Limitations: 

• First-click testing only shows you where users did or didn’t click—it doesn’t tell you why. Without more information, you’ll end up guessing or misunderstanding their motives: maybe you think they’re not clicking a new feature button because they don’t see it as useful, but, in reality, it’s just not well-placed and they haven’t noticed it on the page.

Pro tip: Contentsquare’s experience analytics tools help you get more from first-click tests. Use Heatmaps to visualize exactly where users are clicking and scrolling—then deploy Session Replays and Surveys to go deeper and find out why. 

Heatmaps reveal where users click, scroll and/or hover on a given page 

 4. Card sorting 

Card sorting tests the design, usability, and information architecture of your site or product page. Ask participants to move cards—physical or virtual ones—into the themes or topics they think are the right fit. You can even ask them to come up with labels. 

Strengths: 

• Card sorting helps you understand how your users think and shows you how to create a logical user journey for them

• It’s a relatively quick and easy process

• You can tweak card sorting tests based on what you want to discover. For example, in closed card sorting exercises, you give users categories and ask them to decide which categories fit the cards. In open card sorting tests, users create the categories themselves. Both types offer different user insights.

Limitations: 

• You only gain a partial understanding of users’ navigation needs. Since it’s an abstract test, you don’t learn how they’d categorize different product elements to actually complete tasks. 

5. Tree testing 

To run tree testing, show participants a pared-down product map that branches out into tree-like hierarchies. Then, ask them to do specific tasks on this model, to see how usable and accessible they find the core product experience (PX).

Strengths: 

• Great way to quickly validate whether your design is creating a clear, intuitive navigation experience

• These are easy to set up 

• These offer actionable data on which features or site elements need to be labeled or presented differently

Limitations: 

• Like with card sorting, users only interact with a basic conceptual model of the product. That means you won’t get insights on how users would respond to the full product ‘in the wild’, with added features, visual elements, and environmental cues. 

• Only gives basic data on which elements are blocking users—without digging deeper, you won’t understand why they’re struggling or what they’re trying to do

6. User feedback 

If you want to really understand why users behave the way they do, ask them. Rather than always opting for controlled, analytic testing methods, it can be useful to employ open-ended methods, like surveys or user interviews. 

Strengths: 

• Lets you dig into the why behind user decisions and offers insights into what customers want from your product

• Collects powerful voice-of-customer (VoC) insights that tell a compelling story about your product—and helps you convince stakeholders to get on board with your design ideas

• Helps you discover hidden issues with your product you may not have anticipated

Limitations: 

• User interviews can be time-consuming, and conversations easily go off track 

• It’s difficult to recruit users for interviews or lengthy surveys

• What users tell you sometimes differs from how they actually behave in real-life situations

Pro tip: an all-in-one experience intelligence tool, Contentsquare helps smooth the process of running surveys and interviews. 

• The Surveys tool lets you launch surveys on your site in a couple of minutes. Use one of the templates from our library, or generate the perfect questions for your goals with our AI survey question writer. 

• The Interviews tool simplifies the process of meeting users 1:1 for product discussions. Host the meeting, record, and transcribe your conversation, then pay participants—all through the same platform. 

With Contentsquare Interviews, you can share any key moments from your interview recordings 

7. Split testing 

With split testing methods, you divide users into 2 or more groups and provide each group with a different version of a product page or website element. 

In A/B testing, you work with just 2 user group segments and offer them 2 options at a time. It’s important to ensure there’s only a single variable at play—for example, you might give each group a page that’s identical except for the position of the call-to-action (CTA) button. 

With multivariate tests, you experiment with more variables or different user groups, trying out different design combinations to determine which one users respond to best.   

Strengths: 

• When you’ve narrowed down your design options, split testing is a great way to make final decisions before iterating

• Testing different options lowers the risk factor for new design ideas

• It can be set up with your current users—you don’t necessarily have to recruit focus groups

Limitations: 

• A/B and multivariate tests only give you answers to very specific, variable-dependent goals

• If you’re split testing with real users, you run the risk of frustrating users with an unpopular design idea. This is a bigger problem with A/B testing, where you could potentially be testing with half of your user base!

How to run an effective testing process

Follow these 4 steps to conduct an effective product design testing process:

1. Define clear testing questions. Develop specific research questions and hypotheses based on key user needs or observations you’ve made on your site. All hypotheses must be tied to a specific metric. 

2. Engage a mix of participants. Ensure you test with a mix of current product users and members of your target audience who haven’t used your product before. It’s also a good idea to test with different user groups and demographics. Some testing and product insights tools offer filters to show results for particular kinds of end-users. Contentsquare, for example, lets you sort session replays to evaluate users in a particular region or those who had a positive or negative experience. 

3. Don’t ‘lead’ participants or influence their responses. Don’t over-explain what your product does or what participants should experience when they use it. Let them experience your product and then tell you about it. Encourage honest feedback. 

4. Collaborate and communicate. Work together to design effective testing that answers all your questions. Communicate throughout the testing process to keep the whole team up to date and aligned. 

Use design testing to iterate your way to a brilliant product  

The most important part of testing is turning test insights into actions. It’s easy to collect the data and never do anything with it—but that’s a waste of resources and your users’ time. Make sure the information you gather trickles through to everyday design choices and each stage of the design process. 

One way to do that is to use tools like Contentsquare, which collects visual data to explain your test results—think heatmaps and session replays. Visualizations help your whole team understand test outcomes, and may just spark the idea for your next great prototype.