Evidence strength
Relevant metrics: Acquisition, Activation, Customer feedback, Email Sign ups
Validates: Feasibility, Viability, Desirability
How: Build a product that only solves one specific problem that your customers are having Ð typically a tool with one single feature.
Why: Building just a single feature is a powerful way to start, as you are focused on solving one very specific problem for a very specific niche group better than anyone else. Chances are your early adopters will give you valuable insight into how your product should eventually evolve into a platform.
This experiment is part of the Validation Patterns printed card deck
A collection of 60 product experiments that will validate your idea in a matter of days, not months. They are regularly used by product builders at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Amazon.
Get your deck!Before the experiment
The first thing to do when planning any kind of test or experiment, is to figure out what you want to test. To make critical assumptions explicit, fill out an experiment sheet as you prepare your test. We created a sample sheet for you to get started. Download the Experiment Sheet.
Narrowing the focus
By narrowing down the product experience you are interested in testing and isolating it in its own single feature product, your test results will provide clearer evidence than if the feature had been integrated with other features. The fewer variables than can influence results, the better data reliability you will get.
Control damages to your brand
When you launch a product as a single-feature product, customer expectations are aligned to only expect a single feature. Especially for larger and more well-established brands that risk damaging their brand if experiments run wild, packacking the experiment as a single-feature product without ties to the brand’s core offering, can be beneficial.
After the experiment
To make sure you move forward, it is a good idea to systematically record your the insights you learned and what actions or decisions follow. We created a sample Learning Sheet, that will help you capture insights in the process of turning your product ideas successful. Download the Learning Sheet.
Examples
FiveSecondTest.com
Before releasing as part of their core offering, UsabilityHub launched fivesecondtest.com - a single feature product that was later incorporated into their core offering.
Source: Five second test