02 Aug 2023

Five reasons why you should run a private Beta

If you’ve never run a private Beta before, I’d highly recommend it. They’re incredibly useful – especially when you’re releasing a new service or large, new feature and there is a greater risk of things going wrong.

If you’ve never heard of one, a private Beta is a phase of development where a service or feature isn’t released to everyone. Instead, it is released to a closed group of users, often by invitation only.

We recently ran one for a new service we’ve been designing for energy brokers, and the entire team were very glad we did.

Here are five things I learned from that experience, which explain why private Betas are awesome. Enjoy!

1. Your participants are doing real tasks, in real life

The beauty of private Betas is that participants use your service to complete real tasks that they care about, in their own time and space, to meet their own real needs.

And all this means that the feedback you gain is authentic and valuable.

Illustration of a woman with speech bubbles saying “Is something built, that you can test with?”, “How would participants access it?”, “How would you collect feedback?”, “How long would you run the Beta for?”, “What do you want to learn most?”, “Would you need to set up participants beforehand?”.
Important things to consider when planning a private Beta

2. You can better gauge how useful your service actually is

Users might tell you in one-to-one, interview-style usability testing that they’d ‘definitely’ use your service, and how it would be so useful. However, there’s only so much faith you can put in these statements because, as humans, we’re not that good at predicting the future or our own behaviours.

We heard it a lot throughout our project’s prior usability testing. However, when we ran our private Beta, we discovered users didn’t actually use it as much as they said they would, for several reasons that even they hadn’t predicted.

Albeit a bit disappointing to hear at first, it was very useful as it gave us ideas for how we could improve our service to make it much more useful.

For example, we discovered that one user didn’t engage with our service because they couldn’t ‘bulk upload’ information, which they could do with their current service. Consequently they decided our service wasn’t worth the extra effort to use, despite other benefits. This opened our eyes to a frustration (and an opportunity!) that we hadn’t considered before.

3. You can test the stability of your service

We all know what it’s like when a service just doesn’t work.

Running a Beta allows you to check for any serious bugs or technical issues that might leave your users tearing their hair out – so you can fix them before a release to a bigger audience.

You’ll also hear about minor bugs too; ones that might have been missed during your internal testing. And these are important bugs to know about because they’re the ones your users actually come across, doing the things they actually wanted to do.

When running our Beta, we uncovered a number of things that the team had missed because we weren’t using it in the same way as our users.

4. It doesn’t have to take months and months

A private Beta needn’t take 6 months, or be a huge amount of work. We ran ours for a week, and that was enough.

We were able to define the duration based on the context of the project, and how frequently our users engage with our service – you’d want to do the same when planning your Beta.

5. You can reliably assess whether your service is ‘release ready’

Once your Beta has concluded, you’ll have a far better idea of the value your service is bringing to users. You’ll know who uses it and finds it useful. But importantly, who doesn’t and for what reasons. You’ll also know how technically stable it is.

With all of this additional insight, you’ll have much greater confidence deciding if it is ready to be released more widely.

With all this in mind…

I highly recommend giving a private Beta a go and I’d love to talk with you about taking your first steps to getting started. Drop me a note at henry.bacon@cxpartners.co.uk and we can arrange a call to discuss how you can get the most out of it.

A photo of Henry in conversation with a colleague in a light and airy office

Henry Bacon, UX Consultant

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