I've participated in quite a lot of RoadTest reviews now and I thought I should write down my thoughts on how I tackle a review. This is what I've found works for me and is not the only way to do these. Please leave a comment if you've read my reviews before and what you like or dislike about them!
When to Apply
When I first started I would fill out applications for anything that I thought looked interesting. After reviewing some of these products I realised this is a bad idea. RoadTests take a significant amount of time to work on and what should be a fun hobby can turn into a chore. While you do get to keep the products and they often have a decent financial value there's no income beyond that. So if the product doesn't give you more fulfillment (happiness or money) than the time cost then let it go. My advice is to apply for only for products you are passionate about and skip the ones that you only have a passing interest in.
What I do with the Products
I've actually kept all the products I've received, though some live unloved in a drawer somewhere. The ones I've got the most use of are those I can take to the Code Club I run at my local school. It's been great to be able to expose children to all sorts of devices that they would otherwise not see due to the cost. Because I received them for free I don't stress too much about them being damaged. I've also been exposed to a very large range of products, and now I know better what works well for this age group and what doesn't. I expect over time I will sell or give away the ones I'm not using, in both cases this is a matter of finding the right people who want them.
My Target Audience
When I review I am thinking of the Maker community. I intentionally don't review with a hard-core engineering audience in mind, as I feel that is more niche and there's other reviewers who write for that audience. I expect the audience to be knowledgeable enough to know the terms I am using without defining them in detail, or them to be capable of doing an Internet search for the ones they don't. I try to avoid repeating technical specification that can be easily linked to and overly measuring the product. Instead I think of the way this product will be used and try and assess how well it works for that.
Writing a Review
My drafts are written in Google Docs - I find the Element14 editor not the easiest to work with. What I would really like is to be able to write reviews using Markdown - I rarely require complex formatting and I find a lot of time is wasted trying to get what little I do right.
Getting the length of a review right is a balancing act. There needs to be enough text to tell an interesting story but not so much that the document becomes boring. I start by writing down a bullet point list of the things I want to highlight and then flesh them out. Sections get added/removed and reordered. I don't think my writing is great, but it's something that gets better the more you practice!
I put in lots of pictures showing what I did. I use my smartphone and screenshots to take these. I actually spend quite a lot of time setting up and taking the photos, and I take many more than I use in the final review. Often I need to come back later and take additional photos for things I didn't consider; when I do this I try and get the background consistent with the other pictures.
At the top of each RoadTest is a fixed scoring system. This is in my option pretty useless. The categories often overlap or don't apply well to the product you are reviewing. Most of the products are pretty awesome, so often end up with scores near the maximum of 60 points. I normally find I'm only knocking off a point or two for things that could be better, but are acceptable for the product that it is. I would ignore these numbers reading the reviews, and instead look at the summary for where this product works well.
The final step is to read and re-read the review. I do this by saving it as a draft which then shows it how it will look when published. It looks different to how it looks in the editor, and this is where you get a better view of how the audience will see it. I iterate a number times on this stage after picking up lots of grammar errors and fixing poorly worded sections.
How do you do the reviews you write? What do you want to see in a review?
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