You may have heard us talking about validating an idea, and part of that is to test the desirability of the idea. Desirability Validation is used to de-risk an idea and test the solution, without building it first. This helps to save you time, effort and money.
It also helps to give you confidence that the problem is worth solving; and that people will pay for the solution.
But… how do you actually do that?
Validation methods are things we can do to test our idea and gather evidence for:
whether it’s worth pursuing our idea
whether it's worth pivoting (changing our idea)
whether it's worth stopping the pursuit of an idea
a problem that we might solve
how we might design the best solution possible.
Below we outline a few different validation methods you could use.
Customer Interviewing
This might just be the best first step when it comes to startup validation! Customer interviewing involves asking your potential customers questions around the problem area you’re investigating, with the flexibility to dive deeper on the interesting things your customer brings up.
You never know what unseen avenues your customer will lead you down!
Founders often repeat customer interviewing as they develop their solution to understand their customer’s perspective on the problem and the solutions on offer. Customer interviewing is non-negotiable and should be done by everyone starting a business.
Surveys & Questionnaires
Surveys and questionnaires usually involve sending/posting an online form to prospective customers to gain insight on their perspective.
While useful at providing a small amount of quantitative data (facts and information about your customer), they don’t often give the depth of qualitative insight (their feelings, desires, senses, and motivations), which customer interviewing can. Sometimes, founders choose to start with a survey and follow up with their survey respondents for more in-depth customer interviews!
Card Sorting
Card sorting is when you give your target customers cards and ask them to sort them for you, in order of what matters most to them.
This is a versatile tool that you can use to both understand the key problem or understand what part of the solution is the most desirable for your customer.
Secondary Research
This involves reviewing published articles, papers and other pertinent documents to develop an informed point of view on the problem area or solution feasibility. This is a useful way to ground observations and develop a point of view beyond the individuals you have available to interview.
Trends Data
A quick and easy method of validation involves researching trends data on search engines such as Google. You can quickly gain an understanding of what solutions people are looking for, or what problems people are encountering. This can be a useful way to get a quantitative measure of who is looking to solve a particular problem.
Shadowing
Shadowing means tagging along with your potential customer to observe and understand their day-to-day routines, interactions and contexts. This is a valuable way to reveal design opportunities when you’re ready to start developing a solution.
Fly On The Wall
Be a sneaky little fly on the wall! You can observe and record behaviour within its context without interfering with people’s activities. It is useful to see what people actually do within real contexts and time frames, rather than accept what they say they did after the fact.
Fake Door Tests
Fake door tests are most useful when you’re ready to test the value proposition (description of your product’s benefits) with your customer. A fake door test involves setting up a measure of someone’s intention to purchase without the ability to purchase being available.
For example, making a website which looks as if it sells your product or service but when someone clicks ‘buy’ it redirects them to a page that explains that the product or service isn’t ready yet and asks them to leave their email. Someone clicking ‘buy’ is a much better indication that they would have purchased the product or service, rather than them just telling you they would.