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Beta test outside the early adopter crowd

May 22, 2008 · Posted in India Web 2.0

Depending on who your target audience is, it is so very essential that you do beta testing within a subset of that targeted audience. If your web app is designed for the general audience (read: outside the realm of the early adopter crowd), I’d say you better get your friends-family (assuming they fall outside the early adopter crowd) test out your web app for usability and workflow.

I know, this post may seem somewhat random, out of the blue. And moreso, pretty darn obvious.

The topic originated from an entrepreneur friend, who’s developing a site targeted towards stay at home Indian moms. Adhering to the de-facto Web 2.0 trends, he had all these buttons for Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon etc. While his wife was taking a test drive of the app, she asked him a simple question - ‘ What is Digg’. It took him a good 20-30 minutes to exactly explain to her what Digg is and what the “Digg it” button actually does. This incident made him revisit his app and approach and design it more from a layman’s perspective.

Moral of the story - what may seem obvious to you or me may not be so obvious to someone who’s technically less savvy. And the usability perspective of that person may be crucial to the success of your app.