If you're a designer, you know that your work is only as good as the feedback it receives. The same goes for visual identity testing. Without it, you're just guessing what works best for your audience and brand—not to mention wasting valuable time and resources. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to test your visual identity. In this article, we'll cover how to do so successfully in four easy steps: set a goal, choose an audience that's representative of your target market (and/or clients), have a plan going into the process and be specific when asking questions or looking at results.
Setting a goal is the first step to achieving your visual identity goals. Whether you're looking to launch a new brand or refresh an existing one, it's important that you define what you want to achieve before diving into design work. Why? Because it will help guide the direction of your project and keep things on track--and when projects go off track, they can often take longer than expected (and cost more money).
Here are some tips for setting realistic goals:
Before you begin the test, it's important to choose the right audience. The sample size should be large enough for your test results to be statistically significant, but also small enough that you can easily reach out and ask for feedback from each participant. It's also important that participants are representative of your target audience--if they aren't likely users of your product or service, then their opinions won't matter much anyway!
For example: If you're designing an app for people who love cooking at home instead of eating out all the time (like me), then asking someone who works full-time in a restaurant kitchen isn't going to help much because they probably wouldn't use this type of app anyway...but asking my dad would!
It can be tempting to jump right into the solution and start making your logo bigger or changing the color of your brand. But before you do that, make sure you understand the problem first.
Before setting goals for yourself or your team, it's important to ask yourself: "What do I want?" You might have an idea of what success looks like--but does everyone else? If not, how will they know when they've reached it?
When working on a visual identity project for myself or others (like my clients), I always start with asking questions about their goals for themselves and their business. This includes everything from finances (How much money do we want to make?) or personal growth (How many clients do we need by next year?). By knowing what these goals are and communicating them clearly with your designer(s), they'll be able to help guide the design process in order meet those objectives while also keeping them realistic within reasonable timeframes
Visual identity testing is an essential part of any design process. It's important to get feedback from your target audience, and it's even more important to understand exactly what that audience thinks about the visual identity you're presenting them with.
Including an incentive for providing feedback will help motivate people to participate in the test, but make sure that your incentives don't influence their answers or skew results in any way!
We hope that this guide has helped you understand the importance of visual identity testing, and how to do it. As we said in the beginning, it's not about getting a perfect result or making everyone happy. It's about doing what's right for your brand and its audience so that they feel good about themselves when they look at your logo or other visual elements. And if you can do that well enough, then maybe someday they'll even buy something from you!
