By Owen Fay . Posted on June 27, 2022

Businesses today are more concerned than ever with producing user-friendly products, services, and designs, which means they need to understand their users to meet their needs and expectations.

A major gap exists between how teams build their concepts and how they learn from users. Obtaining user feedback can take days or weeks and typically involves lengthy in-person interviews or long video recordings.

We developed Poll the People to address this issue in product development. Today, fast insights are even more essential to effective product development, especially in this era of rapid product development. We utilize a diverse and dedicated panel of over half a million users standing by to give you valuable feedback.

By providing you with user insights at any stage of the process, our platform’s lightning-fast testing can help you learn and take action fast. With Poll the people, businesses can conduct tests in one hour or less and get the insights to make the right changes to products at the right time.

In this article we’ll go through why learning fast is vital to an organization and why our new approach helps create better businesses.

Why User Feedback Fast, Early, & Often is Important

In recent years the development process has changed from being about what the business wants to accomplish to be all about the user and their experience. We’ve also adopted agile and lean development processes to get resources to the market faster.

The days of six-month-long research projects will soon be over completely, smaller, day or week-long research is easier and more practical for businesses.

Learning, failing, and making adjustments allow teams to build better products, faster by understanding what works and what doesn’t. Doing this at a fast and consistent pace allows businesses to stay relevant and deliver value to customers.

When organizations don’t utilize a rapid testing process most of the development cycle is biased and based on gut instinct. Waiting until after launch to see if a feature, copy, or design is effective in engaging your audience means you’ll often run into issues or learn that you didn’t go with the best options. Speed is a big competitive advantage in a world where customer expectations are rising.

The Cost of Slow Research

Companies have traditionally engaged in user research, which has led to more devoted research teams and a focus on engaging users. However, research is frequently slow, confined, and extremely expensive.

A typical research study takes over 100 hours to complete and costs over $10,000. With the heavy time and money commitment product or design teams often have limited resources.

  • The typical researcher-to-designer-to-developer ratio is 1:5:50 (NN Group Study)
  • 42% of companies don’t collect feedback from customers (HubSpot Research)

Many organizations choose not to undertake it because of the few resources and expensive research process, leaving them with limited to no understanding of how customers feel about and use a product or service. Businesses may as a result introduce concepts that are incorrect, ineffective or don’t meet user expectations and needs.

In the end, the price of launching the incorrect feature, copy, UX, or product can be:

  • An increase in the price of the support services would be needed to handle incoming questions and grievances.
  • The price of missed revenue as a result of consumers who do not convert.
  • The price of brand harm that would be caused by unhappy users.

Introducing Lightning-Fast Testing with Poll the People

In order to develop a thorough understanding of their users at each level of the process, today’s modern, agile teams need quick access to user feedback. Everyone in the business needs to be able to usability test resources and learn from users in order to keep up with user expectations.

Instead of launching a test and waiting days or weeks, Poll the People does the same process in about an hour. Simply upload your concepts to start gathering real feedback; you don’t need any coding or design experience to get started.

Let’s dive into the quick and simple steps of testing with poll the people in just 60 minutes.

Step 1: Pick a Concept Testing UX Platform

For our platform, we will be using Poll the People. Poll the People is a new, fast, self-service platform that lets any company deploy a concept test within minutes. The concept tests are designed as quick 1-question A/B test surveys and completed in less than 60 minutes.

With a self-service system and a free signup, users can get started and deploy their first test within minutes.

There is no need to design your own survey, just use one of the expert-built templates and your feedback will come in immediately. You can watch the opinion responses rolling in a Facebook-style news feed.

Step 2: Pick A Concept Testing Template

The best way to test your concept is to narrow your designs to two choices. Modern psychology research has shown that this is the best way to get user feedback.

Once you have two choices (A and B), you pick an expert-built template from our template library, you can also navigate to our examples page to see how real tests are done.

For concept testing UX, we will use the “Image” template. Upload your two designs and set a question that will be presented to the panel.

That’s it, you’re done with the test set-up, no complicated survey or template to create.

Step 3: Pick the Audience and Number Of Responses

Next, you’ll choose your audience and the number of responses you need. For most tests, about 200 responses are a good number. This should give you sufficient statistical confidence and get enough consumer feedback. Also, the test should be completed quickly within about 60 mins.

If you are short on budget, 100 responses would be fine too. But that would have a larger margin of error.

One of the most important parts of testing is the audience, with our dedicated panel and advanced criteria you can test with an audience that looks just like your target users. We have a number of segmentation and advanced criteria options that lets you create the perfect audience. All you have to do is choose the number of users you want feedback from and any segmentation you need.

Step 4: Launch!

The last step before launch is to review the entire test. Make sure your design options are correct, you are asking a test question that helps to achieve your testing goals, and that the audience size and segmentation are correct.

Now sit back and watch the responses come rolling in within minutes. No waiting for days or weeks, you’ll have all of your feedback in just an hour.

Step 5: Analyze The Results

As the responses come in, you can watch them in a live real-time feed. You can immediately start analyzing the responses. Or you can wait less than an hour and wait for the full test to complete.

The first thing to look at is: Who won? And by what margin? The greater the margin, the greater your confidence in your choice.

Then look at the feedback from the responses. Each respondent has to provide a clear explanation as to why they made their choice. Based on the winning design and the feedback from the respondents, you can then make your decision. That’s it, you are done with your test in less than 60 mins!

Every choice regarding a product is decided using the rapid testing framework, which incorporates user feedback. Rapid testing eliminates any uncertainty from the creation of digital items by relying on user insights at every stage. An organization may produce better products with the assurance that their concept will satisfy users and is exactly what they’re looking for by testing faster and receiving better feedback. Rapid testing is about allowing everyone to use great feedback and data, not about turning everyone into a researcher.

Conclusion

Before spending a ton of time and money developing a concept, you can quickly test your concepts, confirm your assumptions, and see if what you’re trying to develop connects with consumers.

Poll the People, facilitates quick testing and provides modern teams with useful user data in a very short time.

Poll the people gives anybody the ability to test, unlike qualitative testing methods that rely on costly and time-consuming moderated research. If you’re ready to start making better design decisions for less sign up for Poll the People or check out our example test page to learn more.

Owen Fay

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