Every industry is now digital, and the stakes for getting products right are enormous. Across industries, digital leaders’ earnings growth outpaces laggards by 1.8x. But 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet expectations. Two critical factors for success are increasing business agility and creating strong data integrations and workflows.
With Covid-19 having increased digital competition, user-centered design is more important than ever before. Gartner reported that for every 1 customer who complains, 26 churn for the same reason without giving any feedback. And because churn costs include both lost revenue and lost acquisition costs, product managers are highly motivated to collect and implement user feedback asap.
But it isn’t enough to just collect feedback – it matters how and when that feedback is collected. Most Product and Insights teams use alpha and beta testing to get feedback on products or services prior to releasing them into the market. But because those testing methods aren’t continuous, teams run the risk of incorporating outdated feedback. Now they’ve lost revenue, acquisition costs, and wasted R&D spend. There aren’t enough sad face emojis in the world to portray what that feels like.
Businesses need continuous feedback to help inform ongoing improvements that keep up with always-evolving customer expectations. Delta Testing enables the integration of ongoing feedback into all stages of the product development lifecycle, pre- and post- product launch.
What is Delta Testing?
Delta Testing is a new way for Fuel Cycle customers to capture continuous user feedback for improving hardware and software, including mobile apps, websites, and physical products. You can think of it as 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.
Who should use Delta Testing?
Product, UX, and Insights teams can accelerate product improvements across a multitude of use cases, including the following:
Product
For Product Teams, Delta Testing enables continuous feedback, bug reports and features requests. Our solution offers an API, allowing you to integrate with the tools you already use like Jira, ProductBoard, Azure Dev Ops, and other issue tracking software.
UX
For UX Teams, Delta Testing allows you to share wireframes and concepts for commenting, up-down voting, and value scoring. This enables more relevant design for each persona with feedback throughout.
Insights
For Insights Teams, Delta Testing expands the continuous research methodology to cover more specific product and UX needs. In particular, the results create better links between your users with defined methodologies and prioritizations.
Use Cases
Here are a few of many potential use cases for Delta Testing:
- Product Launch: Drive a successful launch through target market feedback
- Product Growth: Leverage your customers to successfully mature your product
- Customer Zero: Create a product culture through engaged employee testing
- Competitive Analysis: Collect actionable intelligence via your competitors’ customers
How does it work?
With Delta Testing, conveniently located within Fuel Cycle’s Community platform, users can report bugs, request new features, comment on feature requests, up-vote, and collaborate with other users on their feedback.
Community moderators, product managers, and developers can respond directly to users, accelerating the cadence of user feedback applied to product development. In addition, Delta Testing is supported with enterprise-ready APIs to sync user feedback directly to existing systems of record.
Since results are refreshed constantly, product managers are empowered with continuous context and accurate insight into the most important features for each user.
How is the data stored and shared?
87% of teams feel their data is spread out across silos, with valuable customer conversations and feedback living hidden across multiple mediums and systems. Due to mass data fragmentation, organizations don’t know what data they have, where it’s stored, and if it’s protected and in compliance.
We bear good news. Fuel Cycle offers an API that enables you to integrate with products like Jira, ProductBoard, and Azure DevOps for bi-directional status syncing. This means there’s no need to login to multiple systems to ensure continuity and as easily accessible as the data is, it remains equally secure.
Delta Testing is supported by existing Fuel Cycle Community solutions that enable rapid product development. This includes focus groups on FC Live, advanced member profiling with the Progressive Profiling Engine, and integrations with your preferred survey providers. All these capabilities ensure Delta Testing is more than just a standalone solution; it fits neatly into existing product development efforts on Fuel Cycle.
Why Delta Testing?
Teams that rely solely on alpha and beta testing are missing out on some of the most important learnings, simply because they’re not collecting the right data from the right people at the right time. And due to exponentially increasing digitalization across all industries, user expectations are greater and there is less and less room to disappoint.
Nearly 5 to 15 percent of all development projects are abandoned due to poor usability. The IEEE found that this amounts to $150 billion lost which could have been avoided with improved customer-centered design. Fuel Cycle’s Delta Testing feature supports our mission to connect brands with their customers for the purpose of building better products to thrive amid always-evolving circumstances.
If you’re a Fuel Cycle customer and are looking to accelerate product improvement, connect with your account lead to learn more. If you want to explore the benefits of running advanced product testing with a thriving community of your most engaged customers, let’s chat!
