B2B Prototyping part 3: How to test your prototypes

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Thanks for all the great feedback on last week’s newsletter on collaboration and rhythm. One subscriber emailed to say it “Totally pinned down something that has been a vague feeling for years.” This is often the reaction when I introduce clients the idea of rhythm and collaboration. We all feel it, but we don’t always notice what causes it.

Today I’m going to talk about how to test your prototypes, and why you might be asking the wrong question. But first, here’s a recap of where we are in the series:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes 
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences (that’s this post!)
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team

THE PROBLEM

I’m an absolute nerd on the history of how we've measured audiences and attention, and one of the most important shifts has been from sampling audiences using small data sets, to our current era of huge amounts of data, complex tracking and ad performance. Digital platforms give you incredibly powerful tools to A/B test content and campaigns, but the risk is that they give you data to encourage you to buy more ads on their platform, not to really understand your audiences as humans.

Based on our research at Storythings about how we make decisions about our attention, we know that these decisions are more complex than the last click attribution or two second 'view’ metrics most platforms give you. Every day, we make dozens, if not hundreds of decisions about what to give our attention to. Some of these are given over to platforms who curate a stream of algorithmic content for us. But some of these are intentful decision to subscribe, schedule, and immerse ourselves in content formats that we really love. The trouble is, most of us are just measuring the first behaviour, not the second.

THE INSIGHT

When people test content prototypes, they are usually asking questions that are variants on “do you like this?” We might use a tool like Net Promoter Score to ask something that places that questions in a social context - “would you recommend this to a friend?” or in the context of a user need “how would this content help you do xxx?”

But there is a bigger challenge these days than just making good, or even valuable, content. You have to get audiences to make the jump from noticing your content to spending time with it. This is the first step in your audience’s journey from awareness to engagement, and it is essentially a question we all ask ourselves when we see something new that we think is useful or interesting - “have I got time for this?”

There are loads of great tv shows, podcasts, articles, reports, interviews and videos that we would like to give our attention to, but many of them don’t make it past being saved or bookmarked. This is why we say to our clients that we don’t have short attention spans, we have short consideration spans - we are all schedulers now, and the first problem we have is to find the time to really give something our attention. This is the problem you should be addressing with your prototypes - not just ‘do you like this format?’ but ‘where would it fit into your daily media habits?’

THE ACTION

Thinking about where your content format might fit into your audiences’ lives will completely change the way you think about prototype testing. Now you’re not just finding about the format itself, but all the different contexts you can use to deliver it. Here’s a couple of tips on how you can do this:

1 - Get curious about people’s attention behaviours
Often, particularly in B2B content, our daily routines and behaviours are very similar to our target audiences, but everyone has their own quirks and habits. If you’re making a prototype of a newsletter, podcast or other editorial series, find a couple of people in your team or target audience who are willing to test it, and experiment with them sending episodes at different times of the day or week.

Get them to talk through exactly what happened when they got the episode - did they click/open/listen straight away? Did they add it to a queue? Did they lose the link in their inbox or stream? This will tell you a lot about the internal thought processes and behaviours that stand between your audience being interested, and fully engaging with your content format.

2 - Find the opportunities to build routines
Doing something completely new takes a lot of effort from users, so it’s easier to try and make your content format fit into the existing routines of your users. Ask them what habits they regularly have - do they have newsletters that they enjoy reading in the morning, or last thing in the working day? Do they listen to a podcast on the way into work, or on a morning jog? When they take a coffee break, do they reach for their social streams, or want to spend time looking at something related to work?

Ask them where they would fit your format into their routine. Would it be something they want to engage with at the same time every week or month? Would they like a deep dive into a subject they can binge before taking a break? Or smaller, ‘snack-ier’ episodes they can fit into their breaks? Even better, ask them to describe their experience of a content format they got really lost in, eg a bingeworthy TV series, book, game or podcast. What made it so compelling they couldn’t wait to get back to it?

3 - Find a gap or a problem that you can solve
Just as we all build regular habits and routines around our content formats, we also have frustrations and gaps as well. It might be that they want a weekly update about issues in their sector, but they can’t find anything doing that already. Or they might want a deep dive into a subject, but most of the information out there is too dry and technical. Or it might be that there is part of the day where they need something that helps them destress or switch off. What could you do with your content format that would meet that need? Is there a gap that you could fill?

4 - Read Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
I think I’ve recommended this book more than any other over the last decade or so. It completely changed my approach to thinking about audience testing and audience research. The title alone is a game changer - we often approach audience testing and research as something that needs to be huge and comprehensive. The reality is that any audience research is valuable, and the optimum amount is, as Erika says - just enough to make a decision. This book will give you lots of practical advice on how to get just enough research to make your prototypes even better.

This loops us back to the problem of too much audience data that I mentioned at the start of this episode. People often think that we need huge amounts of data and surveys for audience insights to be useful. But the reality is, when you’re testing prototypes, it’s the deep insights that are more important than broad surveys. The researcher Tricia Wang put this perfectly when she said that we need not Big Data, but Thick Data.

I hope this has helped you think about how you can test your prototypes. If there’s one thing that I hope you take away from this, it’s that talking to real humans about their behaviours is way more valuable than analysing spreadsheets of data. You are, after all, trying to reach an actual human with your content formats, who has a busy day, and a to-do list of tasks and issues. You’re not designing formats for platforms, but for people. So go out and talk to them!

If you’d like help doing this, we’d love to have a chat:

Next episode, we’ll look at the kinds of questions and answers you can use when you’re testing, and how you can use this feedback to iterate and improve your prototypes.

See you next week!
Matt