Don’t Build Blindly: How to Know If Your Idea Will Fly
?? Welcome to #GetUX 18, where we discuss the path you should take to know if an idea will fly to MVP. Subscribe to get weekly UX insights on startup and business growth!
Startup owners often start with a problem they encountered themselves or things they wish existed. Others take cues from recent changes in the world. Keen founders find problem spaces that have not been disrupted by existing technology.
It’s not rare to see ideas that might seem good at the beginning, but as time goes on, a big problem will start to emerge: those ideas don’t turn into actual business growth.
It’s even more crucial because ideas are actually important; they’re the main drive of the entire project. Without them, the project goes nowhere.
So how does one actually know which idea to turn into something tangible without wasting resources?
The value of ideas is nil
... the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of creating something great. It has to be the right idea and have good taste, but the execution and delivery are what’s key. —Sergey Brin, Google co-founder
Strategically speaking, there is zero value in just an idea.
If you ask around product designer circles, you will notice that many have toolsets already made for them to come up with new ideas. This may seem surprising, but consider their profession. Creative workers need to come up with ideas all the time in their professional lives.
Ideas are easy to come by and easy to dismiss. Therefore, they’re the least costly to change. If you think about it, they're actually the easiest part of a product development cycle — one can do it while daydreaming.
So, it’s important to spend time refining and validating an idea before executing it. This way, you can determine if it’s worth pursuing before wasting effort on something that won’t work.
The question then becomes: how do you know if an idea is good or bad?
How to test ideas
We mentioned previously that there are ways for designers to come up with new ideas. After coming up with an idea though, they need to validate it.
An idea can be validated (or invalidated) through various methods.
Let's take a look at ways to validate your business ideas, starting from the simplest to the most complex.
Desk research
We all build from what previously existed. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. There is always an adjacent product to yours.
See opportunity in this, particularly if the adjacent product is already much greater than yours in size. Look at app market reviews and on sites specifically designed to gather customer feedback.
Try to find what is wrong in the existing product. Look at how the customer thinks they want their problem solved. Does that match with your idea?
If it doesn't, though, it doesn't mean that your idea is wholly invalidated. Sometimes customers don't know what's good for them. Many times, they do.
This is the simplest way to do an idea check. The simplicity, however, is equal to its results: It doesn’t count as much as the other methods. Someone groaning that a competitor’s app doesn’t do what it says on the tin doesn’t automatically mean your idea is validated.
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Interviews
Interviews are one of the easier ways to know if an idea works or not, but you do have to put some thought into it. You don’t need that much preparation: a set of questions and about ten to twenty relevant respondents (potential end-users) will suffice.
There are certain types of important people that you could interview:
During the interview, avoid asking leading questions. You don’t want the idea to be liked, you want the idea to be grilled until it’s no longer bloody and raw. The point of the exercise is to let you know whether you are going to invest in it or not.
If you’re profitable in the long run, then you're going to be happy anyway.
Test an existing product
Find a competitor’s product on the app market, then install it on your phone. Go get some tasks you’d like your testers to do, get five people?and ask them to do those tasks. See if they struggle or perform comfortably.
This is called user testing.
UX designers and researchers do it all the time, in order to gauge whether a given solution or idea worked or not. But they also use it to understand the competition: their strengths and weaknesses; where, why and how it can be improved.
Take notes from this exercise. Check the user’s timings, their comments and thoughts. What they say out loud is important, so ask them to voice their thoughts out loud.
Let a professional do it, as this is not actually as easy as it seems. There are lots under the surface that needs to be checked. Academics have written books about just this subject.
Test your own prototype
This one is harder to do, because in order to do it, you must already have an existing prototype.
In digital design, software prototypes are like slideshows — they look like the software, but only a few clickable links works. Software like Figma and Axure RP are used to design these prototypes. It doesn’t involve any coding, just rough linking between screens.
The testing is almost precisely the same as testing competitor’s apps; though this time, your own app is being tested.
Not all digital app agencies are able to perform this: lack of human resources & knowledge can sometimes hinder their performance.
We at Maturis , however, do provide user testing. We can narrow it down to your region and preferred age range, targeting a specific subset of relevant end-users. We’ll make things simple for you, so get in touch with us now through LinkedIn Messages.
Conclusion
Finding an idea is the easy part. It’s the scrubbing the mud off the diamond that’s rough. To check if an idea is viable to turn into a digital business app in the long run, you have to run user-centered design. This involves research: asking potential end-users and reflecting on the data. Some methods include interviews, desk research, and user testing (competitor’s product, or your prototype).
Maturis is a UI/UX design studio creating tasteful & tested designs aimed to propel business growth. Reach out through LinkedIn Messages, we'd like to take a look at your idea!
This article was written by our UX designer, Arkan Tanriwa , and edited by our UX researcher, Amira Adji . Photos taken from Unsplash and edited by Sinto Wahid .
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