6 points on taking maximum from BETA testing

You have developed a perfect app (or service). Before releasing and starting a marketing campaign you want to gether an initial feedback from potential users and make final fixes and adjustments. How to make it efficiently?

Here I would like to share my experience with BETA testing process. During the process I managed to get lots of information regarding the usability of UI, bugs, attractiveness, willingness to buy the app, possible enhancements, suggestions about new functionality and other useful info. Below you’ll find 6 key points that I’ve learned.

1 You need as many BETA testers as possible.

Think a dozen is enough? Be realistic, you can not judge on opinion of a small set of people. Therefore in order to get a clear view of strong and weak points of your app you need to get as many BETA testers as possible.

Another reason is that you are interested in getting a feedback from your BETA testers, but the truth is that according to my experience:

• not all the brave guys who prommised to test your app will download it
• not all of those who downloaded it will give you a feedback.

2 Start searching for BETA testers as soon as possible.

Start earlier to get more testers. Only when you start to look for the BETA testers in advance you can get many feedbacks from them in time.

3 Attract BETA testers.

Use the curiosity of BETA testers - wake up their interest! Show them something! It could be screenshots of your app or a short movie on YouTube demonstrating attractive aspects of your app Here is my movie as an example

4 Publish your BETA as soon as possible

Publish your BETA once it is ready. Don’t make the testers wait too long - they can lose the interest. Don’t be afraid that you don’t have enough testers - you can add them whenever you get them.

5 Create a survey! Make the process of providing a feedback as easy as possible.

People are lazy in a nature. It takes a lot of effort for the BETA testers to sit and write down anything in a free form, on the other hand it is quite easy to fill in a survey. Create a survey! Include important questions and don’t make it too long - no more than 20 questions. You as a developer want to get valuable and actioable feedback. Right? Then simply ask your testers:

• Is the UI intuitive and simple to use?
• What can be improved?
• Would you pay $X for it?

There are free services which allow you to create a survey for free, just google for them. I used FluidSurveys

6 Don’t wait - ask!

Only 1 out of 10 BETA testers will provide you a feedback. Don’t hesitate to ask providing you with the feedback after some periode of time. Send them a link to your survey and ask to fill it out mentioning that it wouldn’t take much time but will help you a lot.

After you performed all these steps you can lean back and analyze the feedback you got. Take into account suggestions, fix bugs, improve UI and release your amazing app!