You can discover a new market or user need before you even build your first MVP sketch... and you can do this with high confidence, based on real data.

For any product designer or innovator one of the most critical activities is to collect information about your current or potential future users and customers. Ensuring you understand the problems, needs and context of those users is the first step in designing and launching a successful digital service. And getting good data is super important.

Many people might try to achieve this by sending out surveys.

Unfortunately, most surveys can be pretty dull to fill out, it can be difficult to get granular data, engagement is low,  and they don't really provide anything back to your potential users.

Additionally, you rarely get to test and experiment with your key value proposition with surveys.

We have an even better approach for you.

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‍Use a quiz to drive engagement

We actually recommend building a quiz to drive engagement and capture better data (and you can even provide some value back to your potential users).

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How to make an effective quiz experiment

1. Create a fun quiz web app in the space where your future product resides.

If you are building a weight-training product, make a quiz about weight-training, etc. The point of the quiz would be to get to know your users' perceptions about the space you are in, and in return, educate them on it in a playful way.

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2. Choose a startup company name and domain

You don't have to be wedded to a startup name, but choose one that frames the context of the quiz well.

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3. You can also sneak in some more classic survey questions as part of your quiz.

Learn about their age, gender, preferences, etc., by integrating this into the quiz.

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4. Market the quiz app

Use Google Ads or Facebook marketing tools. By testing multiple ads you will learn about the most effective search terms, keywords and messaging for your users. I.e., you can test the high level messaging of different value propositions here.

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5. Collect the data from the quiz to understand your future users better

Look at which keywords and messages performed best. Examine how engaged users are in the domain you are targeting. How many convert and start the quiz? How many complete it? How informed are they?

You will get to understand what users know about your domain and how they relate to the potential concepts you are considering building for them.

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Case: How GSK NEXT used Noodl to create its own quiz app to validate new innovation opportunities.

The challenge

When GSK NEXT, the disruptive innovation arm of the science-led global consumer healthcare company GSK, took up the challenge of developing new services for women’s health, the team took the opportunity to learn about potential users and their challenges with hormonal health, and, rather than create a survey, they launched a web app quiz, naming it Shine.

Results needed to be presented at an executive level just weeks from kickoff.

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Approach

The quiz would be a friendly and fun way to provide women information on specific hormone-related problems, at the same time GSK would learn more about the experiences and existing knowledge women have about these important issues.

GSK also aimed to test brand and value proposition - this required the quiz app to be highly branded, visually appealing and highly intuitive. Noodl was chosen as the platform to develop the app with. Since Noodl is a no-code platform it also enabled designers and data scientists to drive the development.
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Speed is key

In just a couple of weeks, the Shine Quiz App was developed in Noodl, which contained a number of quiz questions about hormone-related issues for women. Intertwined between the quiz questions were a few additional survey questions that GSK used to learn more about who was taking the quiz.

The quiz also contained valuable sources of information for the women taking the quiz, to help them better understand and address issues related to hormonal health.
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Results

Multiple variations of the Shine Quiz App were deployed with a slightly different language, tone of voice and app structure, to test with different audiences. With just a few days of marketing, the GSK team collected thousands of answers from women looking for help with hormone-related health issues.

The data helped the team better understand the worries and needs of future potential users, as well as hands-on data on what type of language and tone fits the target users.

Learn more from  our expert team about building and launching market experiments.
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