Product Validation 101: A Mix Method Approach
The Ultimate Guide to Validating Your Product Ideas with a Mix Method Approach
In this article, i will be covering an outline i created for a client that intends to assist in testing out a new product concept in the Fintech industry.
The Design of this outline is not meant to be rigid, so adapt it as you see fit with your product. It is meant to cover everything from, marketing and community building to both qualitative to quantitative approach.
Lytpay’s Seed Product Ideation Testing
Lytepay developed a new idea known as Seed, a finance app that intends to get freelancers to collect and invest their income in SEED and gain interest rate on top of it, known as Fruits. They asked for me to help in creating an outline in which they can use to test out their ideas and hypothesis in long-term.
“It’s about catching customers in the act, and providing highly relevant and highly contextual information.”
Paul Maritz, CEO at Pivotal
Client’s brief on What is Seed
Seed is positioning LytePay as the income management app to the world. Seed reintroduces the idea of a long-term pension but with short term rewards to create a daily-use finance app that passes the tooth brush test. Mechanically, how Seed works is that, as your freelancing income grows, LytePay gives you a seed fund. LytePay will manage your seed fund to accrue interest for you as you enjoy the fruits from your income growth and investment of effort.
Challenge
Considering Seed being at its ideation stage, it was required to approach the test from multiple fronts from social media community to qualitative and quantitative survey approach that builds up, not only a community but word of mouth and possibly trust in the market. Just merely testing a feature with users would not permit a good insight into the validity of the product and also does not use the full potential of the userbase as a market.
Also the company needed to amplify their efforts to build a community online in order to have a solid user base that can be reliable toward their goals. In an age where all the finance matters are moving to digital apps and crypto, trust and word of mouth are a must if you don't wish for your app to die on launch, and what better way to create trust by actually trying to connect with people you are trying to solve a problem for?
Building an Effective Full Circle Process as seen bellow
1. Build the community. The community breaths life into your product
WHY?
The community helps creating credibility and helps create more customers automatically. An Active community, specially around a product that deals with MONEY, breaths life into the company for people and creates TRUST. It takes the company from a silent digital app to a live product with ACTUAL PEOPLE Behind it. An active social media presence creates credibility for a layman.
LYTE needs to build a community online through:
- Discord
- LYTE Customer service
as it currently has No proper Instagram page and only 98 likes on Facebook and no twitter account. Twitter with its feature of TWITTER POLLS serves a fantastic place to conduct quantitative research. in short, aside from Credibility… you will have a potential test pool you can use at anytime.
Side note on community building
Though this is step one, other steps such as step 2 and 3 can start as building a community will take time. So this step runs parallelly with others but it is just as valuable due to the options it provides from Testing to Marketing to Credibility.
2. Conduct sprints and SET THE GOALS.
clarifying the goals among the team and the stakeholders is Crucial
This step we engage in the first 3 days of a Google sprint while creating an online community and reaching out to groups on Facebook and Reddit and our existing customer base.
Why conduct google sprint meetings for a test?
Due to the sensitivity of the subject which is MONEY each feature can have the potential to make or break the app. EXAMPLE from the Brief:
“Seed is locked-in retention for users. If they leave, they lose seed and seed progress.”
Having these hyper focused sprints where everyone will have their minds spoken, removes clutter for the future and polishes the work at hand when it comes to testing.
Day 1
Morning
- focus only on 1 KEY Component that can be tested.
- gain input from stakeholders and experts, any questions or concerns need to be addressed.
- Identify the issues and challenges.
- Map out the customer journey in detail
Afternoon
- Draw out sketches (wireframes, storyboards) and ideas that are solutions to the challenges in relation to the 1 KEY Component chosen for the test. NOTHING IS STUPID, use a pen and paper to show your ideas.
Day 2
Morning
- Showcase the solutions sketched out and put them up for voting
- narrow down the options and from the remaining top voted solutions and choose the most suitable
Afternoon
- Draw out the chosen solutions and ideas wireframes and storyboards in far greater detail. a full flow low fidelity on a piece of paper would do wonders.
Day 3
- Dedicate time and energy to create a high fidelity prototype of the chosen solutions.
- Make the prototype as close as it can be to what the final product may be in terms of looks and more importantly in terms of experience.
The goal is to give the customers as accurate of a representation as we can so they can give us an accurate feedback
No Code needed here, a Figma prototype works just fine
3. Build a Landing page
show what you are about and what problem your product is going to solve.
- Build the site and show what the Core Values of the app are and what is there to gain for the users.
- the hero section, from copy to image needs to show what is the problem we will solve for users
- Show the app and its design as if its a finished product
- features should be highlighted and how it fits into the users life should be extra highlighted.
- Have a CTA for LEARN MORE, or TEST OUT OUR BETA, or GET EARLY ACCESS and redirect the users to a Mailing list form page (consider mentioning an incentive will be given to testers).
- Have an early bird reward
- Best write what you are about in the Headline in less than 10 words to avoid bounce rate from failure to capture attention.
“Let your hard earned cash, earn more for you!”
“Let your money, work for you with SEED!”
(A/B TESTING CAN HELP DECIDING AND REFINING)
Crucial points using the landing page
- Push traffic to the landing page by posting about the idea on Slack workspaces, micro-communities, Reddit, Betalist, Indiehackers, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn, and cold email campaigns, but it’ll take a lot longer and obviously more work.
- Using targeted google ads takes less time but more costly
- Use Google Analytics to Monitor the users bounce rate, avg page per view and conversion rate to understand the effectiveness
- Use heatmap reading services to view data, monitor users behavior and their heatmaps
4. THE SURVEY
Filter out the potential users and understand their priorities, goals and persona. OPEN Questions, Describe what they dont like about apps that tackle finance. their feeling towards gaining interest through app investment.
What can create trust for them?
Follow this with link from MAZE or Usertesting.com, to the test. (the survey can either be separate in email or imbedded in the test link as testing apps allow surveys)
Using the Survey
- Researches were conducted by using the data gathered from Twitter Polls, use them to validate your ideas with the target market. It also helps as it gives the community value as they feel involved in what is developed (crypto companies do this a lot).
- Analyze the data and highlight the data trends
5. Test time, Judgment Day
Keep the tests short
- Make the prototype used for the test as interactive as possible but keep the screens limited to the question at hand.
- have a post test survey to cover any issues you hypothesized they might encounter
- Have an Open question on the things missed and how they felt
- End it with a survey on, if they be interested in reviewing it again and if possible in person
- Take the data and make improvements
6. Qualitative Interview and Re-test
Day after Judgment Day
- implement the changes realized through the test and post test survey
- Use the pool created in the survey from people that have tested the app before and ask them to re-test the app, this time (if possible) in person or over zoom to see how they react to the NEW changes
(Incentive is 100% needed)
- Conduct semi-structured interviews with them, record reactions and record their screens.
- ask open questions, what concerns them? what they liked and what they think can be better?
- Do not ask leading questions or yes or no questions, let the users explain as honestly as possible what they think
Finale
Congrats if you made it this far. This cycle is meant to be flexible to your need so please apply it but don't be too worried if you dont follow every step 100%.
