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When Is A RoadTest Review Too Much or Too Little?

rscasny

I have been spending more time reading (including proofreading) roadtest reviews. Some of our suppliers are reading your reviews and providing me feedback on them as well. One of the main reasons why a sponsor participates in the RoadTest program is to get feedback about the product, documentation, design tools, and so on. So, your reviews could be read by a variety of stakeholders within the sponsor's organization (engineers, business managers, marketing, etc.). Your reviews are highly visible. (So, make sure you do a spell check before you publish them, please!) While I have always said you don't be a superior writer to be a roadtester, roadtesters should try to spot basic errors and correct them. If you need help, please contact me.

One thing I have noticed recently as I read reviews is that some reviews cover a lot of things. Some have indexes to separate blogs that function as tutorials. I have also noticed that some are fairly short and don't "tell the story behind the review" visually to make a reader think "Wow" this is cool, incredible, etc."

So, when is a review too much or too little?

I do not desire to establish stringent max-word-count guidelines. I never will. After I choose you as an official roadtester, I need you to "take ownership" of the roadtest. I fully understand that people will write reviews differently. In fact, that is something I ponder when I go through the roadtest applications. I want to obtain different kinds of reviews, which in my mind represents different kinds of engineering minds and, yes, different kinds of customers.

But back to my core question: When is a review too much or too little?

There are some experienced roadtest reviews who can juggle gads and gobs of information and, like a conductor at a symphony, produce a multi-faceted, "perfect" review. These are great productions.

But there are also some reviewers who can easily perform the testing but when one reads the review it doesn't flow so smoothly and makes it a bit harder to read.

I personally think: don't forget the basics.

A review should (a) explain what you are going to do and why, (b) provide a background on the product because not all readers will be familiar with it, (c) conduct and describe the results of your tests (this can include an unboxing), (d) go through how you experienced the product and (e) draw some conclusions.

For some roadtesters, too much is when there are side information that bogs down the basics, so they never get to the basics. But for other roadtesters, they can add the side information to explain things that perhaps are not explicitly stated in the sponsor's documentation; these are skilled roadtesters. 

When is a roadtest review too little? The comments are a guide. If our members ask the roadtester a lot of questions, then maybe your review lacks something.

People learn a lot visually. Take a cartesian grid. One can learn more from a graph of a sensor temperature vs Time than just a table of temp data. When a review has no visuals that support what is being stated in the text of your narrative, it is probably too little. Finally, a just-the-right-length review is persuasive. Read the comments of a bunch of reviews. When you see comments like "nice review," you know you have hit a homerun.

Thank you for your time.

Randall Scasny

RoadTest Program Manager

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  • It's always a tricky one. I try to target my road tests towards what I think a potential purchaser might want to know.

    For a microcontroller / FPGA boards that's roughly "does this do what I need and is it easy to get started coding with it". Here I'll tend to focus on the toolchain, documentation and usability as to be honest most devices are more than capable for most projects.

    For bigger stuff like a scope, I've tried to target a couple of groups - a serious puchasers with a detailed review and most E14 members who are thinking "that's cool, I wish I could afford one" with a video summary.

    The content length tends to depend on what I want to say, but obviously is a little influenced by the "size" (i.e. cost mostly). For bigger ticket items it's hard to say that a review could be too long. I've definitely seen the odd one in the past that have been a bit short.

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  • It's always a tricky one. I try to target my road tests towards what I think a potential purchaser might want to know.

    For a microcontroller / FPGA boards that's roughly "does this do what I need and is it easy to get started coding with it". Here I'll tend to focus on the toolchain, documentation and usability as to be honest most devices are more than capable for most projects.

    For bigger stuff like a scope, I've tried to target a couple of groups - a serious puchasers with a detailed review and most E14 members who are thinking "that's cool, I wish I could afford one" with a video summary.

    The content length tends to depend on what I want to say, but obviously is a little influenced by the "size" (i.e. cost mostly). For bigger ticket items it's hard to say that a review could be too long. I've definitely seen the odd one in the past that have been a bit short.

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  • in reply to Fred27

    Agree. I was thinking of writing something similar but thankfully the community got to read your good concise answer instead of my wordy waffle.

    I would add that for microcontroller dev boards a key question I try and address in the review, as it's on my mind when buying something new, is whether you can get up and running in a reasonable time period (based on experience with other boards) without getting bogged down in the learning process. Often with new boards there is very little to work with other than your own experience and the manufacturers documentation. So I try and highlight the pitfalls and the gaps you had to fill along the road test journey.

    Sometimes a short review can be seen as a good thing, especially if everything works very well.  I leave content filling to news reporters and thus I don't expect engineers to follow that wordy approach, just for the sake of it. 

  • in reply to Fred27

      Like  , I also agree on the "potential purchaser" target audience.  SOMETHING sparked your interest enough to apply for the RoadTest.  It had to be more than wanting new gear -  otherwise you probably would not have been selected.  Does the RoadTest item deliver on that spark of interest?  If so, share the experience.  If not, why not?

    I also agree that the cost of the item carries some expectation - within reason.  While insulated screwdirviers and some of the MCU reviewed run about the same price, I would have a hard time coming up with something to say about the screwdrivers.  "Yup.  They're insulated like they said."  I accept the shorter reviews.  BUT... the MCU... tell me why I want that one.  Why should I learn another toolchain?  What makes it worth that effort?  Again, there was something that stood out.  Let's hear about it.