Ideas

What are ideas in delta testing?

In delta testing, ideas are a type of feedback that identify feature additions or improvements that testers believe would elevate their experience with your product. Along with issues and praise, they're one of the three key feedback types.

During delta testing, testers submit ideas as they use your product in their personal environments over a period of time. Examples of ideas include feature requests, suggestions, Requests for Enhancements (RFEs), and anything else that testers want to see in your product. Unlike issues, which are errors to fix, ideas are improvements that enhance usability or satisfaction.

To prioritize top ideas by impact, you can multiply how frequently testers are voting or commenting on an idea (popularity) by the numerical representation of its importance to your stakeholders (weight).

Form elements when collecting ideas

Here are a few elements of an Idea form:

• Title: a short title for the idea
• Description: a detailed response about what the tester believes will improve their product experience
• Feature: the area of the product the feedback relates to
• ID number: the tracking number of the idea
• Comments: an area where admins and other testers can collaborate and provide additional details on the submitted idea
• Votes: a place where testers can vote up an idea
  

What ideas tell you about your product or feature

Soliciting ideas from testers sometimes gets a bad wrap. Teams might see feature requests as an out-of-touch wishlist from people who don't know the product well enough, in which case suggestions become a blackhole where feedback goes to die. 

But even if you aren't planning to build new features right now, or you have higher priority fixes to address before your launch or next release, analyzing the volume and impact of ideas provides valuable insight into the overall product experience. It tells you what problems your customers need or expect your product to solve. Examples of this include:

Performance optimizations: Often, testers will submit ideas or requests that have to do with making their experience faster or more efficient.

Usability enhancements: Testers commonly compare their experiences with other products they use to suggest improvements to your product's interface. This is helpful from a competitor analysis angle. Testers will also naturally encounter areas of friction or usability roadblocks that might impact customer satisfaction at large.

Feature gaps: Seeing an excess of ideas can indicate there are important features missing from your product. Pay attention to the product experiences that are getting the most submissions — it might help you identify high-impact new features to add.

‍Compatibility or integrations: Ideas will often surface in regard to incompatible products in testers' environments. When this happens, it's a clear indicator of potential support issues or negative feedback around incompatibility.