Strategy Research Blog

Maximize Your Home-Usage-Testing Success:
4 Expert Tips

Imagine you’ve found yourself sitting at the conference room table with your strategic-planning team, reviewing your upcoming quarterly plan. The planning-process goal is to uncover additional revenue streams. The completed exploration and ideation research points to product development.

Enter product testing. Product testing is critical to the launch of new products. The wrong flavor profile, bad efficacy, difficult-to-follow user instructions, problematic packaging, or myriad other problems can dampen the long-term success of a product. With product testing, questions and challenges can be addressed through qualitative means, such as focus groups, or by quantitative means through a home-use test with participant feedback captured via an online survey.

While focus groups or taste tests can be quite useful in addressing a number of questions on the path to product launch, I’d like to focus on home-use tests and discuss four considerations to help ensure a successful quantitative home-use test.

• Capture in-the-moment reactions to the product: Participants’ memories can be vague, so to ensure accuracy in your results, providing a paper diary (or even digital or event video) can be very helpful. A diary provides a way for participants to capture their reactions as they use the product. Then they can reference the diary when a survey email link is sent to formally capture their responses (or in the case of a video diary they can upload the video).
  
  Because diaries are used as a reference for inputting responses into the online survey, it is critical that the diaries align nearly identically with the flow and wording of the online survey.
• Rotate products in a paired-comparison test: To avoid order bias, it’s good practice to split your sample into two cells and have each cell start with a different product. This methodology requires a little extra design planning to ensure that accidental swapping of products is addressed, which can be accomplished through variable-programming design in your survey logic.
• Plan the timeline: Home-use tests require a few extra steps in the timeline that may be overlooked and which can impact the final deadline. Ensure you allow for product labeling and packaging time, include a testing window that covers the full range of delivery dates through the post office (and base your data-collection end date on the latest-arriving packages), and allow extra time to develop and align the diaries.
• Consider the tester and his/her environment: Is one child (or even one pet) out of several in a home doing the testing? Can others in the household try or use the test product? In either case, it might be helpful to label the products with the tester’s name and add their name to the diary to help prevent confusion. Also, provide specific instruction about who can use the product.

These considerations will help your research and launch teams prepare the research journey. The successful home-usage test brings confidence in the product launch; it can even result in valuable insights on tweaks to be made before launch. Your executive team won’t be sitting around the conference room table and wondering what consumers will think about your product— they’ll be talking about its successful launch!

Lesley Johnson, CAPM

Senior Project Director

Lesley has built solid research experience in industries as diverse as consumer-packaged goods, durable goods, internet-based business, healthcare/medical devices, and nonprofit/governmental departments/organizations. Her efficiency, attention to detail, and broad knowledge of research ensure each of her projects has the highest level of accuracy and insight. Lesley earned a Bachelor’s from the University of Texas at Arlington and is a Certified Associate Project Manager through the Project Management Institute.

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