7 Common Product Testing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Designing and launching a product isn’t as simple as it may look. A lot of effort goes into developing, planning, and manufacturing a new product. Testing a product or its prototype is one of the most efficient ways to ensure that the final product you launch has the most excellent chance of succeeding. It provides product managers and engineers an insight into the best product decisions they can make to improve customer satisfaction and enhance brand loyalty. This article highlights the standard product testing makes businesses make and how they can be avoided!

Mistake #1: Lack of Intentional Goals

This is the biggest mistake you should avoid in the rapid software testing process. Doing testing without intentional goals is like starting on a journey without a map. Setting goals for testing and having a clear answer to what you are working towards is imperative. Setting clear goals would help you define the test’s purpose rather than following standard procedures. With intentional destinations, you would be ticking off the goals on your to-do list and see if your goals are being served through the testing process. How to avoid this? Decide on what your goals and research question are. One such framework for setting reliable goals is the SMART framework. Setting goals by asking relevant questions can help you overcome this testing mistake!

Mistake #2: Not Setting the Right Tasks

Failing to set precise and proper tasks can hamper your organizational growth in the long run. These tasks can take over the entire user interface without rendering anything profitable and valuable. Setting tasks to validate the prior assumptions with no valuable data is useless to your organization. How can this be avoided? The testing procedures are initiated from your needs to validate your product. You need to define tasks that must be tested to launch and design the product successfully.

Mistake #3: Testing the Unfinished Prototype

As a rule of thumb, testing prototypes at an initial stage is clever. Your mockups don’t need to be perfect for you to understand how the users would react to the same. However, a balance should always be maintained before the testing stage. If you have some new features to display, you should understand how the users would react to the product. How can this be avoided? It would help if you started with testing a few versions at the proper fidelity, not less and not high. Having a single prototype might make people less likely to pr0vide critical feedback and take the product forward to the next stage. Having fewer versions of the product can allow you to identify which would be the best and enable the users to achieve their goals.

Mistake #4: Recruiting the wrong Participants

This is another prototyping mistake made by a majority of project managers. You should carefully choose who you are going to research. One of the most common reasons people stumble over the research is when they think they only need to collect feedback from their target personas. On the other hand, some teams believe they need to test many users for the results. Whether narrowing down or aiming for too large testing groups, you are missing the critical pointers of user testing. What can be done instead? One of the best techniques to overcome this mistake is to recruit loosely and grade on the curve when choosing the research participants. The idea behind this technique is that you can identify usability issues with any tester, not just the one who may fit your ideal customer profile. Removing barriers with quantitative research can help businesses conduct better user research and stretch their budget further.

Mistake #5: Not Voicing the Issues

If the testing participants ignore the problems in the interviews, they will encounter troubles during the interaction and final stages of the product launch. How can this be avoided? It is imperative to ask the participants to voice their thoughts and record them if possible. This will help you to revisit the clips later if the participants need to refresh their memories. Encourage the participants to record and describe the entire testing procedure.

Mistake #6: Not asking the right questions

This testing mistake circles back to participants’ goal-setting mistakes during the task procedure. Also, the roles that aren’t clearly defined would not help you simplify and conduct the testing procedures correctly. What can we do instead? The solution here is to ask yourself questions that would provide greater insight into the research goal and how the users would accomplish specific tasks.

Mistake #7: Missing Feedback Collection Loop

If you don’t have the right tools to help you collect feedback on whether the test is moderated, unmoderated, remote, or in-person, your entire testing procedure can fail. Without a proper system, the time spent on the testing sessions would go waste. If your feedback is disorganized, it will take longer to sort. If not accurately captured, it would be prone to many errors and become a waste. What can we do instead? How you collect feedback would depend mainly on the prototype you are using. Select the right tools for testing, and you are good to go! Carrying out testing isn’t an easy process. Businesses should identify the mistakes they are making during the testing process to successfully launch the product.