Product testing, also known as user testing, is the process of evaluating how well a product works when used by its target audience.
Product testing gives companies useful user insights when designing and developing their software, but like any other strategy, it has some initial costs.
In this piece, we define product testing and discuss its advantages for your startup. Then, we go over the factors that affect product testing costs and provide some advice for lowering your testing costs.
What Is Product Testing, and How Can It Help Your Business?
Software product testing involves having a small group of target users test your app or website to provide feedback and observations during and after using your prototype or live product.
This testing strategy can help your business collect qualitative and quantitative information about users' potential usage behaviors, preferences, and reactions to your interface.
Product testing can greatly aid your product development and growth efforts in the following ways:
- Creating product experiences that users value by involving them in development.
- Reducing churn and support costs by catching UX flaws and resolving them early.
- Simulating how the product will be received by users after launch.
- Ensuring your onboarding strategy works efficiently.
- Preventing bad reviews on a large scale.
- Preventing customer dissatisfaction or complaints.
- Helping brand activation and creating product awareness.
As you can see, product testing campaigns are a valuable resource for improving your software's chances of market success, easily justifying their cost.
What Is the Cost of Product Testing?
There are several contributors to the cost of a product testing campaign. That is why product testing costs can vary widely from one project to another.
1. Product Stage
One of the major contributors to testing costs is the stage of the product you want to test. Testing early wireframes or Figma prototypes often requires more guided, moderated sessions, whereas testing a live app (like an iOS TestFlight build) can be done unmoderated and at scale.
For comparative purposes, you might need to provide two different versions of your onboarding flow (A/B testing) or have users test your product against a competitor's. This can add to the total cost of the campaign.
2. Audience size and recruitment method
Another major contributor to how much product testing will cost you is the size of your target audience and how you recruit them.
Paid product testing is when you hire testers and pay them to use your software and offer their feedback. Paid testers usually provide more accurate and detailed feedback. The downside is that it costs more, especially if you intend to hire a larger audience.
Another way to go about it is to ask people to test your product for free. While it may sound cheap, it can be extremely hard to get reliable feedback from free testers. Also, free testers are hard to reach and recruit if your startup doesn't have an existing community.
3. Test environment
If you plan on using moderated usability labs, you may incur some software and facilitation costs. This type of testing is conducted via Zoom or specialized lab software. Some third-party tools charge high subscription fees for hosting these spaces.
4. Access and Distribution
Instead of shipping physical goods, software testing requires distributing access. This might involve provisioning beta accounts, managing TestFlight invites, or setting up staging environments. The major cost factor here is the engineering time required to safely distribute and revoke access.
5. Human resources
The human resources you need depend largely on your testing method. In a moderated test, you need researchers to conduct and observe the process as users click through the app.
Once the tests are conducted, you need to analyze the resulting data and turn it into actionable insights. This requires people with sufficient knowledge of UX research and data analysis.
6. Data collection
As with any type of research, product testing needs a platform to help you collect, store, and analyze feedback data. Depending on the size of your startup, you might choose:
- Do it yourself using tools like Google Forms or Typeform.
- Outsource to a third-party testing platform.
- Build custom tracking into your app.
The cost of skipping product testing
Although product testing provides a business with many advantages, its costs might be an issue for indie hackers and early-stage startups. However, not doing product testing can cost your business much more.
Just think of how detrimental it would be to your finances if you were to face:
- Developing a feature that nobody wants or needs.
- Launching a confusing onboarding flow that causes 80% of users to drop off immediately.
- Marketing campaigns that promise an experience the app doesn't deliver.
How to reduce the cost of product testing?
Narrow your focus
Make sure you hit the mark with your target audience. Use thorough research to create a persona that represents your ideal user. Setting up a strict screening process improves the accuracy of the feedback you get, meaning you need fewer testers to find the real issues.
Take it unmoderated
You can save yourself the facilitation costs by running unmoderated, async tests. Users can record their screens and microphones while testing your app in their own time. These videos offer valuable insight into how people react to your software naturally.
Outsource
While you can do your product testing in-house, it will cost you more time as you need to recruit testers and set up the infrastructure from scratch. For most startups, it's more feasible to outsource to platforms that already have the audience and tools to perform the tests, collect feedback, and analyze the data.
Product testing made easy
Kieran is a platform that helps you do just that. Kieran allows builders to conduct targeted software product trials. Our platform recruits real people who match the exact audience you're trying to reach.
Kieran offers actionable insights to guide product development and marketing. We handle the recruitment, run the tests, and provide structured feedback showing what happened, where people struggled, and what you should fix.
Final Thoughts: What Does a Product Testing Process Look Like?
Step 1: Choose the feature, prototype, or app you want to test.
Step 2: Determine how product testing fits into your sprint cycle.
Step 3: Establish your testing metrics: ease of use, time to value, task completion rate, and visual design.
Step 4: Define and recruit your target audience.
Step 5: Pick your testing method: moderated video calls or unmoderated async testing.
Step 6: Conduct the test and collect feedback.
Step 7: Analyze the data and integrate the insights into your next development sprint.