Hustler Series: Product Testing

12: Product Testing

Once you get your first production run in hand it’s time to for product testing. The goal of this stage is to confirm that your product works as intended and that there aren’t any unexpected problems. This is relatively simple to do and really only gets complicated if your product must follow strict regulatory rules.

In general, product testing is a way for you to evaluate how users interact with your product. Do they use it how you intended or are there aspects of your product that aren’t intuitive? Ideally you would have done user testing during the prototyping phase and smoothed out any ambiguous user experiences, but some complex products like consume electronics can’t be fully tested as prototypes. In addition to general user testing, you’ll want to put the product through extreme user test cases. This usually means some sort of drop test and environment test. Will the consumer expect your product to withstand a drop without breaking? If they will, you’ll want to do drop tests to confirm you meet their expectations. It’s good to test both the most extreme drop and a series of small drops to find out just what kind of abuse your product can take. Likewise, will the consumer expect your product to withstand certain temperatures and environments? If they will, you’ll want to test various extremes to confirm you meet expectations. For outdoor products this will mean four basic tests. The first is a maximum heat test to evaluate how hot the product can get before failure. Will your product survive the summer in Arizona? The second is a minimum heat test. Will your product survive the winter in Vermont? The third is a temperature cycling test. Will your product survive the temperature change if you move it from direct sunlight outside to an air-conditioned room inside? And the fourth is a water test. Can your product survive high humidity without failing or rusting? What about rain or submersion? You’ll want to know exactly what kind of drops and environmental conditions your consumer expects your product to survive and test each one to make sure you meet expectations. If you decide to include a warranty with your product you’ll also want to use the product testing results to inform the conditions of your warranty.

In addition to the general test cases, you may have to follow strict governmental regulations and testing. This is required for many different product categories such as consumer electronics, home appliances, and children’s toys. If you fail any of the required tests you won’t be able to sell your product to consumers. So make sure you thoroughly understand the testing requirements and design your product accordingly. The worst thing you can do is get all the way to the first production run and then discover you wasted your time and money developing a product that is illegal to sell. You’ll also want to be aware of the timelines associated with conducting these tests. I don’t have personal experience with government regulation testing but, generally, you’re looking at a few weeks from when you send your product off to be tested and when you receive the test results back. But this can vary depending on a range of variables so you’ll want to do detailed research and make sure there aren’t any unexpected costs or time-sinks.

The results of your product testing will determine if you can move forward with your product launch or if you need to make adjustments to your design. Ideally the testing will just act as confirmation that your product performs as expected. However, designing for the real world means nothing is certain. If you do happen to fail a certain test, evaluate all the possible ways that you can solve the underlying issue. Simple solutions, like changing the material or adding a part for more reinforcement, are ideal and low cost. Drastic changes, like completely redesigning certain aspects of your product, are expensive and should be a last resort. Hopefully it doesn’t come to this and everything goes smoothly.

Luckily for Hez Cases there were no government regulations so I only had to evaluate general user test cases. To do this, I bought an iPhone X and personally used the case for a week to get an idea of the case’s performance. A long-term test like this allowed me to see how the case performed under a wide range of real world conditions. I got an idea of everything from how smoothly it slid in and out pockets, to how comfortable it was to hold, and how easy it was to press the buttons. Fortunately it passed my real world testing. I did find that the buttons are a bit on the hard side to press but that’s a minor complaint and will be addressed in future product releases. In my opinion it’s more important for a startup to release an initial product and get it into people’s hands than it is to spend valuable time and money making tiny adjustments to features that already work well. So that’s my rational behind keeping the somewhat stiff buttons. I also managed to do various environmental testing. The case performed great in both a humid, 75 °F environment and a dry, 15 °F environment so I don’t anticipate temperature or moisture to be an issue. And, because the case uses special materials that are resistant to UV radiation, prolonged exposure to direct sunlight shouldn’t be a problem either. The only formal test I have left is a drop test. My real world testing included a few minor drop tests but I still need to do a worst-case scenario drop test. To do the test I ordered a 1:1 dummy iPhone X so I don’t risk destroying my own phone. I will update this post in the coming days once that final testing is done. But everything else seems to work as expected.

And there you have the basics of product testing. Testing for the general user cases is fairly straightforward but things get more complicated when government regulations are involved. Be sure to do thorough research on the government tests that you need to pass as well as the environmental conditions under which consumers will be using your product. Assuming you went into the initial design and prototyping phases with these constraints in mind, your product should pass the tests just fine. Following this phase your product will be ready to sell.