Make sure you are testing BEFORE launch
Somethings you just have to see. Testing your product is one of them. There are no shortcuts here. You will need to dig in, get your hands dirty and see this thing that you’ve built do the stuff it’s supposed to do.
I have and have heard thousands of stories about products launching without a good shakedown. Small things like emails don’t go out to products crashing servers and causing small childen to cry. It’s not pretty, and I’m not kidding. Testing is a job that no one wants to do but absolutely must be done. Just like going to the dentist.
Here’s what I’ve learned from experience.
Use The Real Thing
Use the product hosted on a server connected to the interwebs. Local testing is excellent, but as soon as you add in network lag, you can change the behavior of the product. In some cases, radically so. When you try to load that awesome framework you are using on a 3G network, you may end up regretting all of your decisions in life to this point in time.
So use the real things as much as possible. Don’t emulate anything. Make sure your emails go out, through the service you imagined them to. Do not speculate what it could be. There should be no imaging at this point, and the product is what it is.
Test the ENTIRE process
Don’t just test the part you like the most. This is ESPECIALLY true if you’re the developer of the designer. We all fall in love with the bits that we think is clever and beautiful. But that excellent list view is only part of the entire product, and despite how much you love it, the users may not care.
Test the process from beginning to end. For example:
- Test the signup workflow
- Test the password reset
- Test email confirmation
- Test credit card payment
- Test help
- Test the products function
- How does a customer contact you?
Seeing is believing
Farming testing out to another service or vendor might be more efficient, but you don’t know what’s going on. You need to see the test. You need to watch your customers face when they use the product. You need to hear them tell you that something is fantastic or terrible. Watch the user be delighted by what you’ve done and listen to them when they are not so happy with the next greatest widget.
Tools matter
I have tried to avoid this as much as possible, but I can’t get away from it. Professional tools matter. You can coble a testing suite together, but the amount of time it takes you to do this is going to cost you later. A great example is emulators. Browser emulators are great test tools as you develop. But you need the tools to work in the real world. You need to test on actual devices. And, unless you work for a massive agency, you won’t have a ton of devices so get something that allows you to test on actual devices. They are excellent services that will save your hide.
If you do nothing else, please get a subscription to crossbrowsertesting.com. You can run tests on real devices and see where the bugs are. Then, have your significant other read every email you are going to send out. These two steps will help you avoid embarrassing and maybe costly mistakes.
Testing is dirty work, but if you don’t do it, you will be the one with mud on your face.
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This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
