Product testing is a critical part of your business operations for many reasons. If your company manufactures products to sell to the public, you have to go through several periods of rigorous testing before putting them on the market. Similarly, if you sell products that other companies have manufactured, you need to feel safe in the knowledge that they have been tested properly.
Today, we’re going to dive into the world of product testing, exploring why it’s so important and what needs to be tested. This will give you an overview as to how to approach this particular process if you have products that need to be tested.
Safety Tests
You can’t release products for consumers to buy if they are unsafe. In fact, there are all sorts of legislations and regulations that prevent you from doing this. When someone gets injured or becomes sick because of a defective product, they can sue you with ease. Honestly, there’s going to be no case for you at all; you will lose and have to pay a lot of compensation to the injured party.
Now, that’s just one instance of someone getting hurt by your product. Imagine if the same defection causes injuries to the majority of your customers. Here, you will have to pay all of them compensation if they make legal claims against you. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this could potentially be business-destroying. There are plenty of instances where companies have paid astronomical amounts of money in lawsuits due to things like this. One of the most well-known is General Motors paying $870 million to settle death and injury claims due to faulty ignition switches in their cars!
What Are You Testing?
Evidently, running safety tests is vital to produce something that doesn’t hurt people. But, what exactly are you looking at here? Realistically, you’ll have to run a whole series of tests depending on the product you’re manufacturing. To start, you need to test that all the different moving parts work correctly and in line with one another. Even something as simple as the deep groove ball bearings being slightly misaligned can cause problems that might lead to injuries.
You’ll also need to run safety tests for any electrical components in your products, ensuring they don’t generate sparks or cause electric shocks. Overheating is a safety concern for many electronic gadgets, as demonstrated by the exploding phone fiasco a few years ago. Lastly, be sure that you check your product for any blatant safety hazards based on its construction. For example, sharp or pointed edges that could hurt people. Refine your product and continue running tests until you’re sure that it meets the safety standards.
Functionality Tests
Alongside safety tests, you must test the overall functionality of a product. In essence, does it do what you want it to do? We’ve mentioned cars earlier, so what would you want a car to do? It needs to turn on, steer, the brakes should work, all the functions should be fine, and it should be able to be used on the road with no issues. Naturally, different products have wildly different functions. For instance, if you’re manufacturing a pair of sneakers, you won’t have to run as many functionality tests as someone that’s developing a new smartphone.
Regardless, testing the functions of your product will be critical throughout the development process. Ideally, you should use your target market as test subjects for this. Give them prototypes of your products and see what they think about them. This is an easy way to see if your product is genuinely functional or not. Of course, you will also need to run various other tests without someone involved, but bringing in human subjects helps you get a better view of how your product works in the real world.
What Are You Testing?
Clearly, there are too many things to mention under this point. To try and generalize, you’re basically testing every element of your product that has a function. For instance, say you are making a brand new app. Here, you would test things like the menu buttons, page loading speeds, animations, notifications, and so on. If it was an item of clothing, you’d test things like the durability, stretchiness, ability to be washed without shrinking, etc.
Marketability Testing
Finally, you should also conduct some tests into how marketable a product is. The best way to do this is by designing a prototype and making sure it’s safe and somewhat functional. This isn’t the final product, it’s just a little something to show your target audience. Get people to look at the product and provide feedback, giving you an idea as to how easy it is to sell.
In essence, you’re hoping to see everyone be really excited about the product, keen to use it, and learn more about what it does and when it comes out. This teaches you that the product will definitely be easy to market and sell. Similarly, you may discover that nobody is really interested in the prototype and the feedback is negative. Here, you can go back to the drawing board and take their criticism on board, developing a better product. Or, you can cut your losses and avoid going down a path that will only lead to failure and struggles.
Conclusion: Why Is Product Testing So Important?
To finish this guide, let’s go over why it’s so crucial to test your products. Safety testing is obviously very important for clear reasons. You cannot sell things that are faulty or could cause injury or illness to members of the public. Your company will end up with a permanently damaged reputation if this happens, and it could even liquidate as you’re hit with so many lawsuits.
Functionality testing is critical as it tells you if your product works or not. This stops you from selling products that don’t sell because they simply do not do as advertised. Speaking of which, testing the marketability of a product helps you understand if it’s something that’s worth making or not.
