The countless microsites for FMCG brands with huge ambitions and tiny budgets, the part-time entrepreneurs that tell you ‘nothing like this exists in the market today’. They didn’t fail because their intrinsic quality wasn't high enough, they failed because nobody wanted or needed them. 

Is there a need? How big is the need? Of course, you can never be truly certain, but you can be empirical about it by validating your decisions up front. 

Now I know this sounds radical, but a nice way to test this is just to ask people. About 8 people is fine to begin with, then (if you have the time and money, validate your findings with a larger number). 

Oddly though, agencies are really very bad at this. The usual excuses tend to be “There isn’t enough time”, “It’s too expensive”, “Users don’t know what they want” or “You should know what they want, you’re the designers!”. The trouble mostly lies in the way clients tend to engage their agencies. The agency pitches work that looks good, the client buys it. The agency is happy if the client is happy - no sense rocking the boat by seeing if anyone actually wants this thing. And besides, whose budget is the testing going to come out of? If the agency pays for validating it’s idea, the agency knows that the chances are, it’ll get canned. The truth is that, in the long run, you can’t afford not to consult with users up front because the cost of designing the wrong thing is astronomical in comparison. And it’s not just about the big ideas, it’s the smaller features too. 

So, a cheap(ish) way of testing concepts up front is using a thing we've dubbed Pub Propositions (or alternatively The Mum Pitch). Find 8 - 10 people who are the kind of people you hope to use the thing. It will take a few days to prepare and it will cost you whatever you charge for your time plus the recruitment cost and the incentive for participants. 

Pub propositions

A pub proposition is a sentence, which you can imagine saying to your friend, that describes in simple terms The Thing You Want To Make. Make it as simple and as realistic as possible. Don't think about how the thing is being marketed, just the benefits to the listener. It has to be something you can imagine saying in the pub or to your mum. 

So, “It’s a website where you can type in what you’re looking for and it’ll give you a list of places to find it” is a good way to describe a search engine. You can then add a load more detail about how it actually works, because that’s usually the question people ask next. Adding a little sketch can help but you need to be careful that it actually aids understanding, not hinders it. 

I’ve found that you can test about 15 pub propositions in 45 mins before people start to jumping out of windows. A group of about 8 of your target market will give you enough information to work with. Once you’ve talked them through the ideas, get them to rate them from 1 to 5. This works well for individual big ideas but for individual features you might want to categorise them more into “Don’t like”, “Bread & Butter”, “Nice but I wouldn’t use it all the time” and “Love this”. You can learn a lot about the way people talk about these things in response.