Are we building the right thing?

When we get to the "Are we building the right thing?" question, my clients are usually in the early prototyping or concept phase. So what they are creating hasn't yet made it to customers.

This is the time to start gathering feedback, and to keep testing as your concepts evolve and get increasingly specific. At this stage, we’re exploring which of these approaches we should build out. It’s important to learn what’s resonating, what’s not… and why? You want feedback from people like those in your target audience.

For example, can people understand the concept of what’s being proposed? If the answer is “no,” or “not really”, we want to find out now.

We typically gather this feedback in 1:1 interviews, concept tests, or preference studies. We are not testing interfaces, we are testing loose ideas, purposefully! These may be shared in a storyboard format, a paper prototype, or a simple video.

Through these efforts, the team continues to identify and refine the unmet needs that are most frequently communicated; these are likely the biggest opportunities and the most useful problems to solve. They might even lead you to shift the way features are presented… and eventually, we want to test that, too.