IHUT (In-home Usage Testing): What it is and why it’s important

In-home usage testing puts your product or prototype in the hands of real consumers who fit your target market demographic and psychographic (behavioral) profile. These might be consumers who have purchased your product in the past, consumers who have purchased a competitor product in the past, or those who express openness to trying your kind of product.

For example, you might want to field an IHUT if:

• You want to know how women between the ages of 40 and 65 who regularly purchase healthful supplements feel about your new multivitamin.
• You want to know if men who wear a certain brand or kind of underwear like the look and feel of your competitive prototype.
• You want to know if children whose parents have purchased your brand of yogurt at least 3 times in the past six months can taste a difference in a new formulation.

Importantly, these consumer testers try the product in the natural environment of their own homes. In order for your data to be as accurate as possible, your testing must be run in the real context of its intended usage, at the fidelity your product will be available in supermarkets (or whatever storefront from which consumers will purchase the product).

With IHUT, however, there’s so much more to nail down beyond crafting a professional-grade, rigorous survey design. Your product testing audience must be chosen deliberately and meticulously, and your products must arrive at their homes in the correct condition, with simple, clear instructions on how the survey is to be conducted.

Why use IHUT (In-home Usage Testing) for product validation

Risk mitigation and sustainable product development

In-home usage testing is the best way to mitigate the inherent risk of launching a new product or changing an in-market product.

Money–sometimes millions of dollars worth of it–is not the only thing at stake. When companies bring a product to market that misses the mark, they also risk the future of our planet. In fact, every year, 30,000 new products launch, and over 90% fail (source). When a company takes a product to market without understanding what customers really want, they risk introducing a brand that consumers will snub, sending potentially millions of units of product to landfills.

Untapped opportunities for usage occasions and messaging creation

It’s possible your new or newly-changed product could miss the mark on key usability metrics or sensory metrics like flavor and consistency. But just as often, products actually offer benefits or features the product creators never intentionally innovated for. This exciting possibility makes it crucial to in-home usage test for:

1. Occasion discovery
2. Hearing how your consumers actually use and talk about your product.

Take, for example, the phenomenon that is Truly, the hard seltzer from The Boston Beer Company. The idea was born from a member of their product innovation teams who enjoyed the occasional post-workout drink with her Crossfit friends. They craved a health-conscious beverage: something refreshing, light-bodied, carbonated and with fewer calories.

While the product was originally created with athletes in mind, Truly and the spiked seltzer category quickly became a favorite of summer drinkers enjoying a light, fruited, and refreshing drink at their Fourth of July pool party or boat ride on the lake. By conducting usage occasion testing, the Truly team was able to capitalize on their initial success amongst their core consumers and expand amongst massive groups of consumers nationwide who loved the product, too.

When brands add a qualitative testing component to their survey design, they can also discover what words consumers use to talk about their product, and what perceptions they have of their product. This could be as simple as testing a new shade of blush with plans in the works to call it “Pretty in Pink,” only to realize their testers keep using the word “red” to describe the shade instead.

Authentic usage for authentic results

Often, brands considering product testing choose between two methods: central location testing or in-home usage testing. (More on those differences can be found in this blog.)

Many brands are tempted by the relative ease and (historically) lower cost of central location testing (CLT). You can completely control how the products are presented to consumers and you can watch and measure their reactions in person.

Unfortunately, however, central location testing is flawed most fundamentally by one key factor: consumers can’t test the product in the natural environment of their own home. Consider how results might differ from in-home usage when testing a new kitchen spray in an office, or trying a baking kit in an industrial kitchen, or applying a new serum in the fluorescent lighting of a lab instead of your bathroom at home. It just doesn’t compare to the authenticity of consumers’ natural environments.

Another major pitfall of CLT is that any kind of longitudinal testing is nearly impossible, or at best, increases cost significantly. If you want to answer major questions like:

• Will my product fit into existing habits, or will consumers form new ones?
• Does my product produce the intended effect over a prescribed period of time?
• Does my product support or enable daily habits? Weekly habits? How quickly do consumers use a single unit?

You may be wondering: How long does my IHUT study have to be? While there’s no exact or universal answer, the vast majority of products are used more than once, and of course you want to build a product that encourages repeat purchase and long-term loyalty.

Without the benefit of an at-home, organic environment, there’s no way to accurately measure and assess the relative success of your product.

Luckily, tech-enabled IHUT is making in-home usage testing more accessible, faster, and more cost-effective than ever before.

Types of CPG verticals that can benefit from product testing (with real Highlight client examples)

Grocery

Grocery is a key category for in-home usage testing. Given the relative low cost and weight per unit, sending product for sampling is extremely cost-effective and enables sufficient sample sizes for statistically significant insight gathering.

Tree Top Applesauce is a great example to recently use Highlight’s IHUT solution to get data they needed.

• They identified their top performing SKUs, informing retail and distribution strategy
• Open-ended feedback from parents and their children inspired compelling, consumer-centric marketing messaging
• With data proving how well the product performed, the go-to-market team was able to secure a bigger budget for launch

Household items

Household items is another vertical that requires in-home usage testing. Whether your product is cleaning spray, laundry detergent, or a vacuum cleaner, only the rigors of daily life in a real home can show whether a product is up to the challenge.

Clorox is one brand that turns to Highlight again and again to support their product research roadmap. They’ve used Highlight’s IHUT to:

• Understand purchase intent and price sensitivity
• Measure efficacy and adjust formulation accordingly
• Assess key sensory metrics and stay ahead of the trend curve

Personal care and beauty products

Personal care and beauty products especially need the advantage of in-home usage testing, as these products absolutely require usage over time to measure things like perceived efficacy and occasion usage.

Journ Beauty is a skincare and beauty brand that needed a community of testers to assess their line of foundation across a large variety of skin tones and skin types.

“It was very powerful that Highlight offered a pool of people with different skin tones and with different skin concerns,” said Sara Shah, CEO and founder of Journ Beauty. IHUT will be something we'll be looking to leverage in the near future as we launch more products."

Products for pets

Products for pets are almost exclusively tested through IHUT due to the realities of pet ownership. Highlight supported a major nationwide pet brand in the development of a new cat litter scent. With Highlight’s IHUT solution, the brand team was able to:

• Conduct a 7-day trial with live results incoming to the Highlight platform from Day 1
• Incorporate qualitative testing with video submissions and in-depth interviews
• Understand key purchase drivers among different consumer demographics

Health-supporting products

Wile, a feminine wellness brand, relied on Highlight’s IHUT solution to validate claims for their perimenopausal supplement. In just over a month, their team:

• Had data-driven results around symptom relief and product efficacy
• Better understood purchase intent and price sensitivity
• Gained over 100 product reviews to integrate to their website product pages and other marketing communications

Apparel testing

A major athletics brand came to Highlight to find a niche group of testers that run at least twice a week as a part of their normal routine and already wear a running vest. With a Highlight IHUT, the brand gained:

• Photo and video qualitative feedback over a 10-week study
• An understanding of purchase drivers among different consumer demographics
• Measurements of durability over long-term, organic product usage

What metrics should I track in an IHUT test to measure product success?

The metrics you choose to measure in an in-home usage test depend on:

1. Your business goals
2. The kind of product you are testing

For example, a team of sensory scientists developing a new yogurt formulation may be entirely interested in measuring only sensory metrics, such as flavor, sweetness levels, or consistency. Their brand team, however, may be looking for a totally different set of metrics, such as qualitative feedback to inform their messaging strategy or appeal (or lack thereof) of the packaging design.

With so many ways to measure product success, it helps to have a guide. That’s why Highlight’s product testing platform includes Solution Blueprints–configurable survey design created by our in-house researchers and sensory scientists.

Once you’ve run your survey with your selected audience of testers, you should receive a readout of all the relevant insights gleaned from this group–but you should also access your full dataset for the sake of accuracy and transparency.