When a new product is designed and developed, ensuring that it suits the market’s needs is a very high on the list of priorities. In this article, I will focus on electronic products, but the same holds true for non-highly regulated product categories in general.

Note: in this article about pre-production prototypes, I described the typical steps at which you can get user feedback. If you are unsure about when you’ll have a few products in hand for that, you might want to read that article.

What does user testing involve? Let’s break it down into three different stages:

• R&D trials — getting feedback from known users (typically employees and then a few enthusiastic friends), to make sure it works;
• Target market trials — getting feedback from a wider range of people who are target users — for example, if the product is to be used by restaurants, go out and find restaurants who fit your idea of the target market and who are willing to use the product for some time (and give you their opinion about it).
• Normal mass production and sale — you start to sell the product in many hundreds or in thousands of products to anybody who is willing to buy it. Getting feedback in order to plan for the next version is good, but it’s usually not the main objective here.

Should the new product already be fully compliant to all applicable regulations in all these of these stages? The short answer is ‘no’, but things are not that simple.

But it’s not that simple. Let’s look at them one by one.

1. Product compliance requirements during R&D trials

Someone has to try the prototypes… and of course it’s not yet a completed product, and much remains to be done when it comes to compliance.

However, you need to do a design risk assessment, and involving the engineers who are going to test the prototype in that assessment is highly suggested… what if they get injured and sue your company?

If you have people outside of your company to use the product, you have a duty to inform them of the risk of hazard to personal safety or to property. In a highly litigious country like the USA, you might even want to get them to sign a waiver about it…

And, more generally, use your best judgement. Don’t let a kid use the product without supervision, for instance. Don’t take any cues from scary movies such as M3GAN where people do everything wrong…

2. Product compliance requirements during target market trials

When legislators decide what requirements apply to such and such products, they don’t tend to think of this intermediary stage, with products that are not yet available for sale to the general public. Let’s look at the different logics in the EU vs. the USA.

In the European Union and in the UK, there is no clear clear guideline on this point, but most of the ‘notified bodies’ will generally suggest the following approach:

• Do not skip the risk assessment about the product.
• In the product design, try to take into account the relevant regulatory standards (typically from the IEC) as much as possible.
• You might need to do some initial lab testing. Test for excessive emissions which could cause interference with other electronic products, if that’s a risk. You might not need to do it in the right test chamber etc., as a “quick & dirty” test might suffice.
• If not all the evaluations, testing, etc. haven’t been done yet, you have a duty to inform users of the situation and of the risk of hazard to personal safety or to property.

(This was explained to me by a safety engineer at TUV Sud, and it is consistent with what their competitors generally mention on this topic.)

In the USA, from what I gathered, FCC does not require any certification for low-quantity sales tests (up to maybe a few thousands), even if the RF module(s) are not pre-certified.

John Teel at Predictable Designs shares this advice:

Many electronic hardware startups choose to start with only online sales, then later obtain UL/CSA certification so as to sell to larger retail chains.

This is a smart strategy since there is no point in spending tens of thousands of dollars on certification until you know the product actually sales.

Now, if your product plugs into an electrical outlet, there is a serious safety hazard (starting a fire), and the right thing to do in that case is to go through the proper UL certification first (some people may disagree here, though). As I mentioned, the USA are a highly litigious country, and you don’t want to put a house on fire anyway…

And again, it is good practice to look up the applicable UL/IEC safety standards and take their content into account when designing the product.

3. Product compliance requirements during normal mass production & sale

Here, the situation is much more “black or white”. It’s normal mass production, you are not just selling a few tens or hundreds of units, and you must comply fully to all applicable regulations.

Disclaimer

We are not lawyers. What we wrote above is based only on our understanding of legal requirements. QualityInspection.org does not present this information as a basis for you to make decisions, and we do not accept any liability if you do so.