Incorporating Customer Feedback into Testing Strategy
The digital age is the age of the customer. Customers are more selective, responsive and observant today than ever. Most simply won’t put up with poor functionality or friction. If an app causes customers to jump through hoops and endless workarounds to accomplish their goals, it’s going to fail. Customers expect a consistent and quality experience.
Agile testing provides thorough testing of functionality and requirements for software, but customers often aren’t the focus. When testing isn’t customer or user-centric, it typically misses the mark.
User-centric testing prioritizes the customer’s perspective from start to finish in the testing process. There’s no time like the present to practice user-centric testing by prioritizing customer needs and involving them in the testing process. Gathering customer feedback is imperative to ensure testing teams keep the customer in mind. Let’s dig into some tips for user-centric testing that incorporates customer feedback in the testing process.
What is user-centric testing?
User-centric testing prioritizes — you guessed it — the customer. It sounds simple enough, but the customer can easily get lost in busy iterations and sprints. Agile testers typically do a solid job of testing requirements and technical functionality. Many spend time doing some user experience or usability testing, but the focus is nearly always on functional and technical elements.
User-centric testing makes the customer the sole focus of testing. It requires a change of mindset and the creation of new testing practices, processes and work habits. User-centric testing means testers ultimately determine if a story or feature fulfills the customer’s needs rather than a technical requirement. This approach often includes opening up the testing team members to testing with customers or receiving customer feedback.
Usability testing is similar but differs in that it verifies if the application is user friendly, and it’s not specific to a customer or customer type. User-centric testing goes much deeper than ensuring the application is usable. It provides deep testing that incorporates customer feedback into test development and execution.
The core principles of user-centric testing include:
- adopting a user-focused mindset and testing strategy
- incorporating customer feedback into testing, including test development and planning
- prioritizing customer needs over technical or design preferences
- creating and nurturing communication between testing and customers
- validating applications in real-world situations as well as prepared test environments
- embracing diverse opinions and perspectives to expand test coverage
Making design and functional changes to address customer feedback is simpler when code is still being tested. But what does it all mean for testing teams, and what value does it provide?
What is customer feedback in testing?
Customer feedback refers to asking for and receiving positive, neutral and negative information from customers when using an application or digital product. It is the customer’s reaction to interacting with the application to reach a business goal. All the quality testing strategies in the world won’t stop an application from failing when customer needs are not satisfied.
Customer feedback provides value by informing the development team and testers if an application or feature hits or misses the mark. When using a user-centric approach to testing, customer feedback is the application’s review. Just like customers review products and services on social media or online, they can also review an application’s features, functionality and friction. This feedback provides development and product management teams with honest customer opinions. When customers love an application, customer loyalty improves, as does positive reviews that help increase sales.
Testing teams gain value from customer feedback by understanding the diverse methods and workflows used by customers, which often do not match the happy path. Customer feedback also provides testers with clarity on test prioritization — often the items that are most important to the customer.
For example, many times display defects or issues aren’t high priority to developers, but they are to customers. In the same way, ensuring the data displayed between a mobile app and web app matches at all times might be important to a customer, but a developer might consider the lag during an API update to be a low priority. Feedback provides a user-centric focus on how to prioritize testing based on what customers need or want.
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Incorporating customer feedback into the testing process
Testers must work with selected customers or create ways to learn their pain points. If testing teams cannot connect directly with customers, they can work with customer service agents, who hold a wealth of knowledge of how customers feel about applications and specific features. Another option is to hold customer testing sessions in person or online. Let customers tell you what doesn’t work in the application. Be open to hearing complaints and new ideas.
Testing teams can receive customer feedback in multiple ways. The most common is holding user acceptance testing sessions alongside customers or through a user experience team. Testers enter defects as described by customers with a field value or summary title that indicates the defect derives from customer feedback. The purpose of designating customer feedback defects is to ease finding and gathering similar data in reports.
Other customer feedback methods include surveys and one-to-one meetings between the customer and a tester. Survey data must be analyzed and separated into potential new features versus defects. Testers should take the same approach with meeting notes, analyzing the data to determine if the customer request is best handled by a defect report or a new feature request. Track the status of all feedback defects or requests so that product or account managers can proactively manage customer expectations.
Some ways to make the most of customer feedback through a user-centric testing process includes:
- adopting a customer-centric mindset throughout testing
- reviewing applications for user-centric design
- prioritizing test development and execution based on customer priorities
- establishing continuous feedback or communication with customers
- practicing real-world testing by using a crowdtesting service or team
- starting testing at the beginning of a sprint or iteration
- considering diverse perspectives and edge cases
- using metrics or surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction levels
The user-centric method focuses on user satisfaction rather than verifying every technical requirement. In this way, meeting topics or standups may change to follow a user-centric focus where necessary.
Crowdtesting providers deliver targeted feedback
A crowdtesting provider, like Applause, can also provide value when internal efforts are lackluster. Crowdtesting provides significant benefits, including high adaptability and scalability, diverse testers with global characteristics, unbiased testing with new users and expanded test coverage across platforms, browsers, connectivity, operating systems and devices. Crowdtesting services provide valuable customer feedback and represent a real user’s experience using an application. Crowdtesting also generates innovative ideas for improving applications based on unbiased feedback.
User-centric testing engages customers and involves them intimately in the testing process. By understanding customer needs and incorporating ongoing customer feedback, testing teams can build testing around the needs of the customer. First impressions can last an application’s lifetime. Get it right every time by focusing testing on the customer’s needs.
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