If you’re part of a design team, you know that building a new feature for your product can be both time-consuming and challenging, especially without early input from your users.
How do you get actionable, valuable feedback on your design concepts without slowing down the design process? And how can you ensure the end-product you deliver is the best possible solution for your users?
In this article, Product Designer at Sprig, Ben Kolde, walks you through how his design team used Sprig’s Concept Testing feature to test and validate their design solutions and save countless hours of development work.
Keep reading to learn how your team can use the power of asynchronous Concept Testing to improve your design workflow, and build better products faster with confidence.
✏️ Thanks to our friends at Sprig for sponsoring this blog post! Blog illustrations by ls.graphics.
Our design challenge
Hi! I’m Ben, Product Design Lead at Sprig (formerly UserLeap). In case you’re not familiar with Sprig, we’re a product research platform that helps design teams capture quick (but in depth) insights from their actual users.
As a part of our suite of tools, we offer custom microsurveys — short, targeted surveys that you can deliver to specific users at specific moments directly within your product experience.
Our customers love our microsurveys, but recently started coming to us with a problem they encountered. The more and more microsurveys they created, the harder it became to manage and organize them all on their account.
We were confident that we could come up with a solution, and immediately started building a foldering and organization structure to meet our customer’s needs.
The problem with design feedback: You need it fast, but the process of gathering it is painfully slow
Like many of our customers, we had a short design window to build the new feature and knew it would be nearly impossible to use traditional in-person user research sessions, even if we went fast and rushed the process (which we didn’t want to do!).
Identifying our customer list, reaching out, scheduling interviews, finding the time to conduct the interviews, and analyzing all of their feedback was ultimately going to slow us down in terms of delivering a solution.
However, we knew that getting customer feedback early on would save us a ton of time in the long run and help us ultimately deliver the best possible product.
How Asynchronous Concept Testing Helped Gather 40 rich pieces of user feedback in less than 72 hours
To help us ship out a design we were confident our customers would love, we decided to use one of Sprig’s newest user research tools, Concept Testing.
We prototyped 3 different design solutions in Figma and developed 3 questions for our design testers to answer—1 video and 2 written.
Using our Concept Testing tool, we were able to recruit design testers directly from our own user base without having to invest time in recruiting a panel. We simply selected which platform to recruit participants from (web, email, mobile, or link) and identified what events would trigger the recruitment message to appear. In minutes we had a list of customers to show the concept test to and were able to launch right in the audience builder.
Through video transcriptions and open text analysis, we collected qualitative insights that were actually actionable, and that went beyond simply stating which option people liked the most. Instead, we were able to uncover why they really liked that option.
We received over 40 responses to our survey within the first few days and had a clear winning design. The survey also helped us identify why our customers chose this option:
- They could more clearly see more surveys.
- It was easy to identify and see the folders.
- There was a good use of screen space.
How to ensure you never skip user research on your designs again (but still hit your deadlines)
We know that all of our designs should be tested in front of our users, but finding the time between aggressive development deadlines and competing priorities can be difficult. Using an asynchronous concept test, recruiting our own users via an in-app microsurvey, and offloading the analysis to AI allowed us to launch our survey in minutes and get really valuable feedback from our customers in just days.
The next time your design team launches a new product or feature, give Sprig’s Concept Testing a try to quickly gather customer feedback, speed up your design process, and launch your product with confidence. Running up to a deadline on a product you’re designing right now? Take our Concept Testing functionality for a spin for free and get user feedback back in the next few days. ■
Ben is a multidisciplinary designer who’s passionate about building experiences between brand and product. He’s currently a Design Lead at Sprig, helping to build an all-in-one product research platform. In the past, he’s worked at several startups in industries such as healthcare, telemedicine, and direct-to-consumer brands.
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