 Here's the hard truth. A number of things can contribute to your product's success or failure. You might have a groundbreaking idea, but if your product idea wasn't tested properly, it could be a complete flop. So what do we do? As a designer, we concept test like our lives depend on it. So let's talk about what is concept testing, why we use it, a step-by-step guide, and what to do with the results. Then a personal failure story, more on that later. So what is concept testing? Concept testing is a user testing method. You show an approximation of the product or service, one that captures the key value proposition. This helps you determine if it meets the needs of the target audience. But why? Concept testing can help shed light on potential blind spots, inefficiencies, misinterpretations, and problem-resulting from market disinterest. Ooh, disinterest. Here are some reasons why I think this method is absolutely crucial. Number one is to chuck out your poor ideas. Remember, even the most successful executives make these mistakes. Number two is gain insights on the market readiness. You want to know if people are ready for your product. The websites have been running. I'm just reading, I'm in the compression. It just needs users. Yeah, no shit. Then understand customers' issues and pain points. You took a good phone and you made it all like shit. What about preventing financial losses? What are we talking about here? You want us to launch a cryptocurrency? And have you thought about, you can potentially discover new unexplored ideas and solutions? Yeah, even if he's joking two at a time, there are what, 800 guys in that room, so that's 400 times whatever the mean jerk time is? The why? Okay, that's enough of the why. Let's give you the step-by-step guide. So this is what to do before you start. You want to define the problem you want to solve. Your problem statement must be a concise description of the issues that need to be addressed. Then define the market. When doing concept testing, emotions, human behaviors, and subjective opinions actually matter a whole lot. Three, decide on who to involve in the test. You should involve as many members of the product team as possible in concept testing. Thank you all for being here. Alan, Lisa, Josh, Yana, Katie, Ramon. Number four, define your success metrics and criteria. By defining this, you will decide upfront what positive and negative results actually mean. So you can then avoid based on the decision when you debrief. Number five, establish your hypothesis. At this point, there is not only one good solution for the problem. Problems can be solved in many different ways. Once you're settled, move on to finding a new perspective on your solution. So this is what you do after your concept testing. You want to one, brainstorm potential solutions. Two, storyboard your concept from end to end. Ask the following questions. Which are our most riskiest assumptions from our proto personas? Which are the most ambiguous statements the team has agreed on? Which are the least database statements? What happens if these assumptions are proven not to be true? Three, build prototypes. This enables you to provide users with a visual representation of the concept idea without engineering efforts. Important thing here, determine what needs to be tested. Number four, recruit your market. Examine what this character is trying to accomplish. What problems could your product solve for this person? Define your market criteria based on demographics, role, age and behaviors. Five, write the interview and test script. Six, let the testing begin. Focus on being empathetic and learning about your users. Discover your users' ultimate goals. Then determine your riskiest assumption. And which of the following elements are the most critical to test? For example, attention. Does the idea attract the audience's attention? What about comprehension? Is the idea clearly understood? How about motivation? Does the idea inspire the audience to take a desired action? What about personal relevance? Can the audience connect with the idea? Number seven, gather your notes. Debrief your team together on the positives and the negatives. And of course, a general comment in order to find patterns and decide whether your hypotheses or assumptions were validated or invalidated. Along with the team involved in the process, determine what should be the next steps. As promised, here's my personal failure story. I recently built multiple SaaS tools and let me tell you this. I was not ready for a flop, but that was precisely what happened. So I had this ingenious idea, a problem I was suffering from and I was pretty sure others felt the same. I was wrong. We released our tool called Divi, an auto-private-notion-page tool. We weren't getting to it. But it struggled to acquire users. We chose to build fast with a strong hypothesis. That was two months wasted. One easy way I should have validated my hypothesis without building an entire product is through concept testing, a method that could save our team from wasting time and money on products that, fundamentally, nobody wanted to use. And that hurt. Emotional damage! If you're interested in learning more about concept testing with detailed guides and templates, check out the link in the description. Hit the big red button for another Playboy Breakdown of UX Frameworks. Bye! Seriously, bye.