Why Your Feedback Matters
If you’ve been selected for one of our Betabound exclusive opportunities, congratulations! These can be notoriously elusive to join and your application stood out amongst hundreds or even thousands of fellow Betabounders. You’ve been selected because our test managers think you’ll make a great contribution to the future of the product that’ll be tested. Veteran Betabounders already know what to expect. But if this is your first test with us, you might be asking yourself – how do I help?
At the start of the test, you’ll usually be met with a list of activities and regular surveys to complete. This list will help you get acquainted with the product’s features throughout the week and you’ll be able to tell us about your experience when completing those surveys. While that’s a very important way of collecting your feedback, it’s just as important to get your thoughts as they arise at any time during the test. For these kinds of thoughts, we use Issues, Ideas, and Praise.
Report an Issue
Our clients depend on your experience with their unreleased product to find any new bugs yet to be discovered or any problems that might still be occurring in their latest build. By filling out an Issue, you can share your findings with both the dev team and your fellow testers. Include as many details as possible, including steps to reproduce the problem you ran into and any screenshots or videos that can help our clients better understand what went wrong.
Suggest an Idea
Sometimes a product’s biggest weakness isn’t what is going wrong, but what’s missing. Since the product you’re testing is still being finalized, don’t be afraid to share any ideas on ways you think it can be improved. Take your experience with the product and ask yourself if there’s anything you’d like to see added to this product before you’d buy it in a store. The same goes for any existing feature or aspect of the product that you’d like to see tweaked. Developers don’t always have an opportunity to consult people outside of their team so your perspective can make a world of a difference.
Express Praise
While we’ve already gone over the importance of reporting what’s wrong or what’s missing, it’s also worth noting what you like the most about the product. If you were blown away by certain functionalities or were just very impressed with the overall experience, let us know! Our clients can rely on this type of feedback to know they are on the right track with their product’s future. While many things can change between the testing period and public release, you want to make sure that the parts that really worked for you don’t go anywhere.
No amount of testing in a lab can recreate the conditions a new product will be exposed to when it reaches the real world. That’s why the feedback you provide during one of our tests is so important. An insightful tester can use and experience a product in ways a product development team couldn’t even imagine. That’s why every single Betabounder is an indispensable asset to the many companies that ask them to test their products.
Look familiar? This post is a part of a series in which we’re breathing new life into some of our older entries.