Testing feelings and mindsets

This article applies to: UserTesting 

On this page:

• About testing feelings and mindsets
• Before-and-after approach
• Measure someone’s mindset
• Best practices

About testing feelings and mindsets

There are many reasons you might want to test a contributor’s feelings.

• Measuring feelings helps you create better products for your customers by understanding their mindset around your company and its products and services.
• You might want to know how customers feel about the usability of your website or app, or you're curious if a new feature excites them.
• Maybe you want to know whether your content comes across as genuine or evokes trust.
• Did the content you present change their feelings or opinions about your company?

Before-and-after approach

• One approach to testing feelings would be to ask questions before and after a contributor views your content.
• This could be accomplished with verbal questions, rating scale questions, or multiple choice questions.
• Here's an example of this in action:
  1. Ask a verbal response question, "What are your current feelings about [company/design/content]?"
     
     
     
     • Asking this question before sharing your content provides a baseline for how a customer feels about your company/product.
     • Do they have any knowledge of who you are or what you do?
     • Do they have positive or negative feelings about your company/product?
     • Will the content you present change their opinion?
  2. After the contributor has finished going through your test, ask a verbal response question:
     
     
     
     • The answer to the question will let you know how your content affected people and how contributors feel about your company/product.
     • This can validate that you’re heading in the right direction or let you know changes need to be made.
  3. Multiple choice question-type example to use after a contributor views your content:
     

Measure someone’s mindset

• You can measure someone’s mindset by asking multiple choice or rating scale questions.
• This approach allows you to provide feelings for contributors to choose from as well as how much or little they agree with statements regarding their sentiments.
• Here's an example of this in action:
  1. In this multiple choice example, the content of an article was tested and you want to find out how it affected the contributor’s mindset.
     
     
     
  2. Follow up with another multiple choice question to see whether the content changed their attitudes at all.
  3. If contributors express very negative or very positive attitudes, then ask a rating scale question.
     

Best practices

• Ask contributors about their feelings both before and after they've seen your content. Doing so will determine whether the content impacted their opinion.
• Include a range of feelings when asking multiple choice questions.
• Ask contributors to explain their feelings.
• Follow up multiple choice questions with rating scale questions.

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