The Importance of Product Testing in Product Development
In a world of countless choices, product testing is no longer just about making sure a product works as intended. It’s about creating products that exceed consumer expectations and, ultimately, generate the kind of excitement that gives you a competitive advantage.
Whether you want to optimize an existing product or launch a new one, product testing is essential to guaranteeing your product’s effectiveness, maximizing its usability, and generating compelling marketing claims before it reaches the market.
Product testing is also a tool for uncovering hidden potential—user feedback and data can help uncover the need for new features, unexpected benefits that can be highlighted, and potential new use cases to be explored.
Our strategic approach to product development research provides a solid foundation for building and improving products. Let’s look closer at the importance of product testing, its methods, and its place in your product development process.
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7 Reasons Why Product Testing Is Important
5 Methods to Test Your Products
7 Reasons Why Product Testing Is Important
Product testing is a fundamental step in product development to safeguard both the consumer and brand. It helps businesses identify user pain points and other product deficiencies and streamline the user experience before bringing the product to market. Here are seven key reasons why product testing is a crucial component of any successful product development strategy:
1. Reduce Product Risk
Most importantly, product testing minimizes the risk of product malfunction, which could lead to customer dissatisfaction, negative reviews, and even legal issues. By identifying and addressing problems early on, you safeguard your reputation and build customer trust.
2. Identify Potential Pain Points
Before launch, product testing can uncover pain points that could detract from the user experience. This goes beyond “does the product work as intended,” uncovering subtle changes you could make to setup instructions, user interfaces, and more to make the product easier to use.
3. Improve Product Quality
You can scrutinize your product’s performance under various conditions through product testing. Passive data collected from devices themselves during testing helps ensure your products consistently function as they should and live up to their quality promise.
4. Understand Consumer Needs and Preferences
Testing your products with potential users—specifically the consumer segments you plan to target when you bring your product to market—gives you the opportunity to gather direct feedback on their needs and preferences. Their opinions, suggestions, and experiences are invaluable. We use them to generate ideas for improvements and new product features.
5. Gain a Competitive Advantage
Thoroughly tested products work better, have better user experiences, and have features and marketing messages informed directly by user feedback. All of this amounts to a competitive advantage against companies that don’t undertake rigorous testing.
6. Save on Costs
An initial investment in product testing mitigates long-term costs linked with post-launch rectifications, returns, and damage control. You avoid hefty, unexpected expenditures by ensuring your product works how it should and meets market expectations.
7. Inform Marketing Strategies
The insights gleaned from product testing go beyond product development. These insights can also shape marketing and advertising campaigns. For example, if a product feature is a clear winner during testing, emphasizing it in your marketing materials can attract potential customers.
Product Testing: When and Why
Product tests can look different depending on the objectives, timeline, budget, and (obviously!) the product itself. But fundamentally, it’s about designing an engagement that allows you to evaluate a product’s performance, usability, benefits, and (sometimes) safety with the end user.
When Should You Test Your Product?
Product testing should ideally be an ongoing process integrated at different stages of the product life cycle. Initial testing could occur before a product is in a nascent stage to gain feedback on the concept for it among target users. Then, trial testing often happens after product design but before full-scale production is launched. After launch, continued testing can provide data on potential improvements for future product generations.
Should You Always Test Your Product?
While some level of testing is likely always necessary, the intensity and extensiveness of your product testing will vary based on the product, market, and business context. For instance, a product intended for a highly competitive or regulated market will require more rigorous testing. In fact, Campos often helps with clinical trial implementation for heavily regulated products.
Regardless, incorporating some level of product testing is a best practice for all businesses, as it minimizes risk and improves customer satisfaction.
What Does the Product Testing Process Look Like?
● Define the Objectives: As with any research, you must clearly identify what you want to learn. Are you testing the product’s ease of use? Assessing its behavior under specific scenarios? Confirming whether or not it meets the needs of your target? Clearly defined objectives guide the rest of the testing process.
● Identify the Target Audience: Define your product’s end users. The product should be tested by individuals who fit that exact demographic. (Not sure who you should/could be targeting with your product? We can help with that!)
● Determine the best methodology: There are many different ways in which you can test products and get feedback from users. Should this be done in person or virtually? More qualitative or quantitative or both? Campos’s strategists will work with you to understand what you’re trying to learn and then recommend the methodology that we think fits best based on our decades of experience.
● Recruit Participants: One of the most challenging steps is finding even a small number of people who fit the specific target audience and are willing to participate. Our recruitment experts pair innovative and traditional recruitment methods with creative engagement tactics to ensure our clients’ research goals are met using the best possible group of respondents.
● Construct the Research Instruments. This step can be done before, during, or after recruitment, but at some point, you’ll need to develop the exact research tools you’ll be using. This process will vary depending on the methodology you landed on but may include a discussion guide for interviews, a note-taking guide for observations, diary questions or prompts for diary studies, etc.
● Conduct the Test: Now, the fun part! Conduct the actual product test according to the parameters you’ve set.
● Analyze the Results: Once the tests have been conducted, someone has to sift through all that quantitative and qualitative data. Often our clients focus on assessing the passive data they’ve collected from their product while we synthesize user feedback and data. Our strategy team is skilled at honing in on the most critical findings across the study and making strategic product and marketing recommendations based on them.
● Implement Changes: Use the insights gained from the test to make any necessary changes or improvements to the product. This is also where you can begin crafting research-informed marketing messages.
● Repeat as Necessary: The process doesn’t stop after one round of tests. Repeat testing as necessary, especially after making significant product changes!
5 Methods to Test Your Products
Product testing isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. There are numerous methods, each with unique advantages tailored to different types of products or stages of development. Here are five common strategies:
1. On-site product tests: Consumers visit a research facility or other location (e.g., a company’s offices) to use the product while being observed; the session often ends with a qualitative interview.
2. In-home user tests (IHUT): Consumers test the product at home for days or weeks, often while completing diary surveys or interviews to provide feedback on their experience. Sometimes includes baseline diary surveys to compare their experience before using the product vs. during.
3. Ethnographic research: Researchers observe people using new products in a “natural” environment, such as their home or a store, taking detailed notes on everything the person does while fading into the background to avoid influencing their actions. This process is often followed up by an interview.
4. Usability/UX Testing: A form of ethnographic research often used with digital products in which the researcher observes the participant using a product (like a website or app, for example) to identify ways in which it could be improved/streamlined.
5. A/B Testing: Ideal for digital products, A/B testing involves creating two versions of a product or product feature, testing them among two groups, and seeing which performs better
Examples of Successful Product Testing
Product testing is an effective tool that brings tangible benefits, leading to significant product improvements and successful market launches. In one real-world example, we partnered with a multinational health device manufacturer to test a wellness device’s claims related to sleep and stress. With a challenging timeline and complex protocol, we efficiently executed a 47-day home-use clinical trial that illuminated the product’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling necessary adjustments for a successful market debut.
In another example, we helped a health technology company assess a new app to improve sleep quality before a rapidly approaching launch date. The 14-day trial evaluated how appealing the app was, identified barriers to using the app, and identified opportunities for optimization. This process confirmed the app’s feasibility and bolstered the company’s reputation as sleep experts.
Choosing the Right Product Testing Vendor
Such successes underscore the importance of selecting a knowledgeable, experienced product testing partner. The right product testing partner will help you develop the right testing methodology, recruit the right people to participate in the trial, conduct the test in a way that relieves you of all the logistical headaches, and deliver valuable insights and recommendations that will help ensure the successful launch of your product.
When selecting a vendor, consider factors like relevant experience, methodological expertise, and how well they collaborate with partners like you. Remember, a successful product test does more than validate assumptions; it provides insights critical to your product’s ultimate success—so choose wisely! Ready to ensure your product’s success with rigorous and insightful testing? Contact Campos to get started.