The Beta Test. It's the shakedown cruise for your Web-based product and the cause of many long days and sleepless nights. When launching a new site, it's the developer's lot to suffer the bug hunts and interface tweaks that precede the back-patting and heavy drinking.

While the beta test is deeply integrated into most launch schedules, few developers, managers or marketers currently leverage the full potential of this stage of development. Beyond its traditional role as an exercise in bug squashing and usability testing, the beta test can yield a huge amount of useful customer information, if you take the time to ask for it.

A controlled beta test and its associated research results will help you refine the final version of the site. Issues that are identified can be addressed before launch, increasing the likelihood that the site will succeed when it is released into the general marketplace. The beta test provides a confident understanding of how the product will actually be adopted by real customers in a natural setting.

In our last article, we covered all you need to know about culling qualitative and quantitative information from your site users. So in this article, we'll follow up with tips on supercharging your beta test with rigorous quantitative methods. It's not hard, and the information you gain might just save you a costly relaunch a few months down the road.