Why Digital Quality Matters More Than Ever
July 27, 2022

Rob Mason
Applause

Share this

We're living in a digital-first world, where digital customer engagement is more important than ever before. If a company's digital strategy and quality is still a simple check box, it isn't good enough anymore. Customers' expectations are continuing to rise, and today's organizations need to be mindful of this reality, and prepare to go above and beyond.


What's The Value of Digital Quality?

You've been here before: waiting for a web page to load. You keep refreshing it, but still no luck. How many times will you try to reload the page before visiting a different site? Probably not too many. Brands today have just a few moments at most to captivate and delight potential customers.

My organization, Applause, recently conducted a research report with the hopes of understanding the value and role of digital quality today. Our research included data from around the globe, including 70+ industries, various digital quality testing categories, 340,000+ bugs, 13,000 mobile devices, 1,000 unique desktops, and 500 different OS versions.

We used our data to identify common flaws in digital experiences and share suggestions and tips for organizations to keep these flaws from making their way into production. Here's what we're suggesting, based on our findings:

Prioritize Accessibility: Accessibility isn't a choice. Legal risks come into play when accessibility isn't given proper attention. But a brand's digital accessibility should go above and beyond basic requirements. Inclusive design, that allows everyone to access your app or device, needs to be of the highest priority.

Comprehensive functional testing is a requirement: A brand's digital quality is dependent on making sure comprehensive functional testing is part of every digital experience.

When it comes to payments, test in the wild: There are many options for completing a purchase online today, from crypto, to digital wallets, to buy now and pay later. The best way to make sure your customers can buy something with their preferred payment method is to test them all. Plus, to really understand the user experience, you should test in real-world settings, not just in the lab.

Application localization: When an organization moves into a new market, its websites, products, applications, etc., need to be adapted to local languages and cultural expectations. This helps with better customer adoption and brand sentiment.

Implement tracking across different locations and devices: It remains a challenge to have a consistent performance for a website or application across different operating systems, networks, and devices. Not only may a user start an online experience on a phone and then move to a laptop or tablet, but there may be a physical touchpoint involved too (like placing a Starbucks order on the app and picking it up in the store). Brands must work to make the digital experience across devices and locations as seamless as possible by keeping it a priority for testing.

Digital Quality: A Business Level Priority

Our report results demonstrate that organizations that focus on digital quality, and shifting left to include quality testing earlier in the software development cycle, are providing better and more successful customer experiences. Using this approach, bugs are discovered earlier, and different devices, locations, languages, and other variables are considered and accounted for. This saves time that would otherwise be spent on addressing these issues after the product has been released, and results in an overall improvement in digital experiences for all customers.

Ultimately, the research confirms that as customers continue to demand better, more seamless digital experiences, digital quality must become and remain a top priority.

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause
Share this

The Latest

November 28, 2023

Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...

November 27, 2023

Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...

November 22, 2023

Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...

November 21, 2023

Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...

November 20, 2023

This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...

November 16, 2023

As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...

November 15, 2023

In the same way a city is a sum of its districts and neighborhoods, complex IT systems are made of many components that continually interact. Observability requires a comprehensive and connected view of all aspects of the system, including even some that don't directly relate to its technological innards ...

November 14, 2023

Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy ...

November 13, 2023

In today's rapidly evolving business environment, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are grappling with the challenge of regaining control over their IT roadmap. The constant evolution and introduction of new technology releases, combined with the pressure to deliver innovation on shrinking budgets, has added layers of complexity for executives who must transform the perception of the role of the IT leader from cost managers and maintainers to strategic enablers of growth and profitability ...

November 09, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has saturated the conversation around technology as compelling new tools like ChatGPT produce headlines every day. Enterprise leaders have correctly identified the potential of AI — and its many tributary technologies — to generate new efficiencies at scale, particularly in the cloud era. But as we now know, these technologies are rarely plug-and-play, for reasons both technical and human ...