User experience (UX) testing is the process of understanding end users, what they need, and what they value when interacting with a product, system, or service. However, the challenge with traditional methods, like beta testing, is that it’s not continuous; The feedback becomes stale, and insights are fragmented. 5 to 15% of all development projects are abandoned due to poor usability. This amounts to $150 billion lost due to a lack of adequate user experience research.
Delta Testing is the next generation of user testing, harnessing the power of continuous development. This guide will explain how delta testing works and why it’s so useful for UX designers looking to improve their designs while saving time, money, and resources along the way.
What Is Delta Testing?
Delta Testing is a new way for customers to capture continuous user feedback for improving hardware and software, including mobile apps, websites, and physical products. It is the next generation of product testing because it removes the risks of traditional alpha and beta testing by enabling ongoing, user-initiated feedback for more customer-led product decisions throughout the development lifecycle.
With Delta Testing, brands can receive 3x the amount of feedback and collect prioritized and actionable insights in half the time and cost. This helps them achieve better product outcomes faster.
What Are The Key Benefits Of Delta Testing?
Today’s digital products are built continuously rather than in discrete cycles. To keep up with always-evolving customer expectations and stay competitive, businesses need continuous feedback on their products. However, most current testing methods aren’t continuous, so teams risk incorporating outdated feedback, leading to lost revenue and wasted research and development (R&D) spending.
Using Delta Testing, you can improve a product with feedback during each stage of the development process.
In addition to being feedback-driven, Delta Testing offers several benefits that can help you achieve your goals as a business.
- Delta Testing improves digital product development
- Increases collaboration between customers, developers, and product teams
- Delivers continuous research to enterprises
- Extends insights capabilities directly to product teams
- It helps product teams to iterate faster and with greater confidence
How Does Delta Testing Work?
Within the Fuel Cycle’s Delta Testing program, you can report bugs, request new features, and collaborate with other users on your feedback.
Community moderators, product managers, and developers can directly respond to user feedback, accelerating the pace at which user needs shape product development.
Fuel Cycle also supports enterprise-ready APIs that sync customer feedback directly to existing systems of record, like Jira, Azure DevOps, Pivotal Tracker, and more. Using Fuel Cycle, product managers and researchers can deploy dozens of concurrent tests to groups of users that are segmented using the platform’s advanced profiling technology.
The general flow of Delta Testing looks like this:
1. Phase Scoping
2. Tester Replenishment
3. Tester Engagement Management & Feedback Management
4. Present & Implement Results
Continuous Feedback With Delta Testing Use Case
A company seeds an early version of a new app to employee groups, segmented by device type and mobile operating system. Employees can submit found bugs, upvote others’ encountered bugs and share screenshots with the product team. The company seeds new app versions every two weeks, ensuring wide-scale testing takes place before apps are delivered to customers.
The company is investing in lightweight mobile apps for markets where users expect smaller app sizes. They can deliver these apps to testers worldwide and offer support in languages that are native to their users. Testers’ feedback syncs with the company’s issue-tracking solution so that developers can prioritize feature requests from users and find issues reported by testers, who get automatic updates as new fixes are rolled out.
The company then tests a smartphone-connected card reader for small business owners. They ship the physical card reader to the merchants and gather feedback on design problems and opportunities over a testing period. Afterward, they sync this data with their customer relationship management (CRM) system and prioritize feedback based on customers’ lifetime value.
Zapier Update
Zapier is an easy way to connect your Delta Testing project to other web applications. With over 5000 pre-built integrations, your project can easily interact with any of those thousands of applications.
For example, when you get feedback about a bug, you can create an automated workflow that notifies your internal Slack channel and updates a Jira bug ticket as soon as possible.
Teams That Need Continuous Feedback
Fuel Cycle’s new offering can help your business make better product decisions by revealing customer feedback. Product, UX, and Insights teams can all benefit in unique ways.
Delta Testing gives Product Teams continuous feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. It integrates with your tools, like Jira, Product Board, Azure DevOps, and other issue-tracking software.
Delta Testing enables UX teams to share wireframes and concepts for commenting, up-down voting, and value scoring. This gives each persona a more relevant design throughout the process, with feedback at each step.
Delta Testing helps Insights Teams by extending continuous research methodologies to cover more specific product and UX needs. The results create better links between your users and your prioritization process.
Bottom Line
Fuel Cycle Delta Testing allows organizations in any industry to improve product success by capturing user feedback at any stage of the development process.
Fuel Cycle offers significant advances over traditional software testing practices by emphasizing collaboration between customers and product teams, scalability, and a focus on accelerating insights to action. In addition, Fuel Cycle is versatile, with innovative products available via the Fuel Cycle Research Engine.
Fuel Cycle provides the tools any organization needs to identify customer needs quickly and efficiently, helping them succeed despite market volatility.
If you’re a Fuel Cycle customer looking to accelerate product improvement, connect with your account lead today or request a demo.
