How to smoke test a product or feature set so you don’t waste valuable time building something that no one cares about.

Overview

Here’s the situation: you’ve got a brand new product or feature set that’s coming down from stakeholders or management that they want to see designed, built out, and monetized.

But here’s the catch: they have no idea if it will actually sell. How do you figure that out without wasting a boatload of time and money?

Today, I’m going to teach you how to smoke test any product, feature, or idea against your real target market to make sure it will be a hit before you ever start building.

WTF is a smoke test?

Traditionally, smoke tests were done by engineers looking to see if the circuitry of a product would hold up under load.

If the circuits smoked, they would know that it failed, hence the name smoke test.

While software development uses it’s own version of smoke testing which focuses on functionality, in the UI/UX field, our version of smoke testing focuses on determine whether or not our target users will actually give a shit about what we’re creating for them.

This is also sometimes referred to as “market validation,” “problem-solution-fit,” and/or “commercial viability.

But wait, I’m not a marketer, why would I need to know this?

Because, my friend, as a UI/UX designer, you need to know, not think, not assume; KNOW whether or not a new product or feature set is going to land well before you sink the next six months into designing and testing it.

In short, we need to know if people are actually going to give a shit before we put in a bunch of time and effort, and a smoke test allows us to do just that.

The elements of a smoke test

For a successful smoke test, you need four, crucial things:

Unique selling point (USP)

Think of this as your one-liner that you use to pick up users. This is your big, sexy hook that addresses a user’s specific pain-point directly, and gets them interested in what you have to offer.

Example using Fabletics’ USP:

“We can’t fix your lives but we can fix your activewear. Great fit. Premium fabrics. Tech you actually need. And stylish as hell. You’re welcome.”

See what I’m talking about? Punchy, pithy, and geared towards your users’ unique needs and wants.

Website or landing page

After your USP, you’ll need a website or landing page.

If you’re looking to create one and just need to get one banged out real quick, check out the link below. Not affiliated, just a good list.

Targeted traffic

Now that you have your landing page, you will want to route traffic comprised of your target users to this page so they can be presented with your USP and offering.

This is done by primarily by leveraging advertising services where your users are that let you target by demographic. Some of the most popular ones can be found here:

Tracking tools

Lastly, you will need tracking tools to make sure that your users are actually converting. Here are some tools that you can use to do just that:

Conducting the smoke test

Alright, so now that you have all the constituent components setup for your smoke test, you want to make sure that you have your USP front and center when the user follows your link.

This is the meat and potatoes of your landing page right here:

• USP (unique selling point) featured prominently with your branding and a mockup of your product.
• Your product’s core benefits to your target users
• Explanation of how your product delivers these benefits.
• Testimonials that tell people how good your product is (get real quotes from people you’ve interviewed).
• Showcase your price-point for user consideration.
• Have a buy now button that allows a user to click to make a purchase.

“Buy now” is your bread and butter

NOW your “buy now” button does NOT have to route a user to a checkout page! Instead, you should route the users to a “pre-order” page where they give you their email, so you can let them know when your product will be ready.

This is the absolute essence of a smoke test, because when a user clicks “buy now” they are truly interested in making an actual purchase.

Short of taking money from a user, this is the most direct way to gauge commercial viability of your product, or, how much your users actually care about your given solution.

How to determine success

Once you have allowed this campaign to run for a while, you want to look at two numbers:

1. How many people have visited the landing page?
2. How many people have clicked the “buy now” button and given you their email address?

Time for some quick math: for every 1000 visitors to this landing page, if even just 50 of them click that “buy now” button (5%), that’s a really good sign of commercial viability.

This number is important, and tells you two things right off the bat:

• Enough people are interested that you’re getting a 5% conversion rate, and
• You can probably hone your messaging/offer to get it even higher.

Let this be your benchmark: if you are consistently getting less than a 5% conversion rate for your landing page, despite your best efforts, there is a high likelihood that either:

• Your messaging is not resonating with your target users, or
• They’re just not interested in what you’re offering

Which leaves you with three fundamental options: pivot, persevere, or pause.

Pivot

A pivot is where you assess your current offering, conduct additional user research, tweak it based on your findings, and try the smoke test again to see if you can get better results.

Persevere

When you persevere, you keep going and tweak your messaging and advertising methods in an attempt to get more and/or different groups of users to see your offering so you can garner validation (5%), or

Pause

Pausing is where you take a minute, assess the situation, see if maybe the whole thing just isn’t working, talk with your team, and go back to the drawing board if need be.

Are there videos that can show me how to do this?

Yes, there is a really thorough one right here:

and right here:

How about resources?

I got you covered.

Bringing it all together

Today you learned how to smoke test any product, feature, or idea against your real target market to make sure it will be a hit before you ever start building.

Using these principles, you can test, evaluate, and validate almost any product, UI/UX, or feature-set idea that you have before it ever hits the open market, and before your team ever even starts building the real thing.