How Designers Test Their Hypothesis: Budget-friendly Edition

Table of contents

1. How Designers Test Their Hypothesis?

2. Landing pages

3. User interviews

4. Error pages

5. Demo videos

6. Email campaigns offering to participate in early bird program / pre-ordering

7. A/B tests

8. Key takeaways

Reading Time: 8 minutes

A great way to see if the idea will be in demand is a separate landing page for the new product. It’s a perfect option for innovative solutions that are too risky to test on the working website. The availability of web design courses to learn the basics and free website builders with ready-to-go templates (like Wix), allows to get a landing page up and running in less than a day. Once done, you can set up a social media targeting campaign to see whether your potential customers are interested in the product.

Talking to real people brings powerful insights about your assumptions, gets you acquainted with the main pain points, and gives you even more ideas on what you can do better. Personalizing potential users also allows being more precise in creating use case scenarios.

The great option to find people to interview is either using the existing customer base starting from users who already left some feedback about the product. If you plan the launch of a new product, check negative feedback about the competitor’s solutions on social media. Usually, people are willing to dedicate their time for free, but you can consider additional incentives. The main thing here is to ask the right questions focusing on what issues users see during the flow and how they resolve them, avoiding the hints to the answers you want to receive, as it will spoil the results.

404 error may be frustrating to see if you are the customer who wants to make a purchase. Yet it’s the simplest method to test if your product will be in demand, as it does not require additional development. To decide whether it’s worth going that way is to track the button or link used to land on that page to see how much traffic this page receives. Doing so will help you to see how many users click on the link to measure their interest in the product you plan to develop. They can confuse the users, as it may appear that a legitimate page is not working. It works for the companies with a high range of products like Amazon, where seeing 404, a user would just go to another page, while with small startups it may spoil user experience and disrupt trust if everything seems to be faulty (for such cases, putting a coming-soon page on the feature you plan to use will be a better solution).

Depending on the product life cycle, some methods may not be applicable (i.e. A/B testing would work for the existing products) and some work better.

It’s required to be really careful applying these techniques as some of them may be harmful for the reputation or might be perceived as bugs (404 pages). If you opt for methods like pre-ordering, it’s worth informing users who applied that it was a test. After its completion, offer some encouragement for participating in it, if you don’t plan the launch anytime soon. The same applies if you decide to refuse the idea due to the lack of participants or any other reason.

As you see, there are different ways of testing hypotheses prior to launching a new product or implementing a new feature into the existing one. It’s better to try cheaper variants first to find out whether it’s worth doing further explorations.