Last year, most of the beta tests run by our services team lasted between three to six weeks. Most projects have an active testing phase of at least two weeks. The length of your mobile beta test is tied to your project goals (and to some degree, the complexity of your product).
7) Base Your Project Length on Your Goals
By focusing these groups on separate tasks, you’ll get the coverage you need without sacrificing feedback volume or quality. If you have more than three or four features to evaluate each week, consider recruiting a large sample of testers and splitting them into groups. In our experience, planning for three to four features each week is just right. Overloading their plates results in declining feedback and participation. With this in mind, try not to overwhelm them with too many activities. Your testers are balancing your mobile beta test (and in some cases, your hardware components) with their daily responsibilities. Just make sure you have enough testers in each segment to produce conclusive results. You can also derive keen insights from segmenting based on attributes like region, gender, technographics, or technical know-how. User segmentation isn’t limited to operating systems. This surfaces nuances within the two user experiences but allows you to see the total impact of issues that occur on multiple platforms. But rather than running two separate tests or waiting until your test is finished to split it up, you can segment your single tester pool by operating system ( hopefully with automation).
If you’re developing an app for both iOS and Android, you’ll need to beta test with both iOS and Android (duh). Other Documents That Help with Mobile Beta Test Planning: The information you can glean from MRDs and PRDs (Marketing Requirements and Product Requirements Documents, respectively) can give you a headstart on test planning. Take advantage of your marketing and product teams’ expertise in relevant market challenges. A little cushion in your timeline goes a long way to offset unexpected delays. This is especially true for mobile apps with a hardware component. If you’ve run beta tests before, you’ve probably experienced hold-ups that pushed out your timeline. This is where your strategy meeting with stakeholders really comes in handy. Prioritize the top items first, and ensure things that fall out of scope are low-risk. Rather than thinning these resources by pursuing several goals at once, focus on what you can realistically accomplish. Each one requires an allotment of time and tester focus, which you have in limited supply. Think of each goal in your mobile beta test – be it assessing connectivity or setting up a key feature – as its own tiny project. You can only move so many mountains during a single project. Then, give yourself at least two weeks before you start your beta test to design a plan around what you learned. These strategy sessions give other teams – typically Support, QA, and Product – a chance to talk about their priorities.īefore you start building your plan, set up 30 to 60 minutes to discuss your beta test goals with team leaders. It’s essential to meet with your stakeholders to discuss the terms of your project. 1) Host a Strategy Session with Your Stakeholders If it’s your responsibility to surface these nuances (as it could be if you’re reading this blog post), here are 10 tips you can use when planning your next mobile beta test. The difficulty in making a mobile app so seamless that users hardly realize they’re using it is that it takes an incredibly deep and nuanced understanding of the user experience. If your company is like most organizations, there’s a team running a mobile beta test to prevent either scenario.
One, it gets buried on a screen full of other apps and forgotten about. When a mobile app is sluggish, unresponsive, or difficult to use, one of two things is likely to happen.