Business Name

Testing messaging or in-market features

Scenario: You’re interested in how to position or message your business or product or if you’re interested in evaluating features that are already in-market
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Suggestion: Consider using your real business name to capture not only insights regarding the feature or message being evaluated, but sentiment on your brand. Alternatively, you can obscure your brand name behind a feigned name if you’d rather glean insights without divulging your business.

Testing features of a specific, stand-alone product

Scenario: You’re evaluating the features or messaging of a specific product or product line rather than more generic features of your business at-large.

‍Suggestion: Validated can run a study using your product name. This can be more effective than using your business name as product names are commonly more evocative of the product’s underlying features and value propositions than the business name is. You can use your product’s actual name or create a stand-in if you’d rather withhold the product’s real name.

Testing prospective or unrealized features

Scenario: You’re interested in testing business or product features that you have yet to develop or bring to market.

Suggestion: Using a feigned or made-up business name enables you to gain insights without being potentially dilutive to your brand or unintentionally misdirecting prospective users.

Describing What You’re Building

We’re asking you to describe the essence of the “thing” you’re evaluating.

If you’re testing product features, tell us the core product that underlies all the existing or potential features. What is the high level purpose of the product? Who does it serve? What benefit is it intended to bring to them? Answer these questions in a straightforward, factual manner. Avoid going into detail on features – we’ll do that later.

You don’t need to go into depth at this point – what we’re really looking for is a sentence or two that enable us to understand core idea and benefits that would ideally persist, even if the features being tested were absent.

Defining Study Criteria

The crux of running a clean study that elicits clear signal is properly and accurately defining the test parameters. It’s crucial that you thoughtfully define the feature you want to test.
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Validated requires two dimensions for feature you’re testing:

1. Description of the feature
2. Explanation of the feature’s importance to your users

When responding to either prompt, please utilize the following general principles:
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• Do use concise, simple language: Validated works optimally when your inputs are easy to understand and conceptualize
• Don’t invoke marketing or tech-speak: utilizing garish verbiage obscures the core propositions you’re trying to evaluate
• Do be as objective as possible: pretend like you’re an impartial observer – how would you articulate the feature?
• Don’t use superlatives for the sole sake of flourish: strong descriptors can be useful in emphasizing key concepts, but hyperbole is not

Below is guidance on how to formulate responses for each respective dimensions in a way that will optimize study outcomes.

Defining Features

Describe the feature you’d like to test as concisely as you can. The 75 character limit encourages straightforward definitions that are free of flourish and superlatives. We ask you to expound on virtues and strengths in the next question – this question should stick to objective facts.

Examples

CONCEPT

BAD

GOOD

Savings account

Our interest rates that will knock your socks off!

Interest rates consistently above national average

Smart irrigation

Weather aware sprinklers produce the greenest lawns

Watering times that account for weather forecasts

Tool that digests emails

The next-generation way to consolidate your email communications

AI-filtered digests of email communications

Massage gun

Massage settings that are perfectly dialed to your body’s needs

Pressure and heat that detects and adjusts to muscle tension

Marketplace for virtual services

Gain customers for your services at the touch of a button

Marketplace for advertising, scheduling and paying for virtual services

Defining Importance to Users

For each feature or value proposition you want to test, explain how it brings value to its users. This is a good opportunity to call out competitive advantages, unique benefits, or anything else that helps set the concept being tested apart. However, It’s important to remain factual and objective – avoid marketing and business-speak or any coded language that may be challenging to interpret.

CONCEPT

BAD

GOOD

High savings rate

Your money is 100% safe while gaining on the highest savings rate found anywhere

Deposits are insured and investments historically deliver returns 0.5% above national average

Weather-aware watering timer

The greenest sprinkler on the market also saves massive amounts of water

Cuts water usage and bills by 10% on average

AI-assisted email digests

Cuts the time spent reading emails to virtually zero

Summarizes the contents of emails into a single digest optimized for relevance and readability

Customized massage routines

Ultimate relaxation from massage settings that are tuned perfectly to your body

Automatically sets temperature and pressure based on detected muscle tension

Online virtual service marketplace

Gets users more exposure and paid faster for virtual services than any marketplace platform

Handles the end-to-end process of virtual service fulfillment; no need for external integrations

Brand Assets

In order to run studies, Validated generates high-quality, optimized creative assets for insertion into ads. We can generate these creative assets based on the information you’ve previously provided, but you can also provide guidance that we’ll adhere to when generating creative assets. This guidance can be in the form of logos, brand kits, or other imagery.

If your study invokes your real business and product names, we’ll adhere as closely as possible to what you upload. If your study requires that we obscure your brand, we’ll instead use the uploaded assets as loose inspiration.

This step is optional: if you don’t upload any assets, we’ll automatically generate high-quality brand assets that are consistent with the information you’ve already provided.