How Crutchfield Does In-House Testing

The secret recipe Crutchfield bakes into every in-house test it conducts is one-part participation, one-part discussion, two-parts consensus and four-parts action. Participants can't do anything wrong; they're there to provide insight into consumer behavior. Just one person mentioning a problem is enough for Crutchfield to consider a change or action, Miller said. Here are some of his tips to running an effective in-house testing program:

• specify your details up front — know what you're testing for;
• plan your test out, including running a dry test first;
• take advantage of outside testing tools, such as UserTesting.com, which provides results within 24 hours of a test, and can segment results by gender, age, income, among a host of other categories;
• be cautious of participants being too complimentary to your business — you want to know what you need to improve upon;
• test regularly (Miller would like to see Crutchfield be able to test twice a month, rather than it's current one test per month);
• provide a quiet, comfortable testing environment;
• don't just test when you're launching a new project;
• test at the beginning of campaigns so that your learnings can be implemented right away;
• weed out professional testers — Miller notes that professional testers tend to ask about compensation first, so be on the lookout;
• run niche tests that you can extract specific takeaways from (e.g., a women's apparel retailer testing men who are going to buy clothes for their wives online);
• involve stakeholders in the post-testing discussion; and
• hand off test results for action.