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Why Digital Quality Matters More Than Ever

Rob Mason
Applause

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

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Why Digital Quality Matters More Than Ever

Rob Mason
Applause

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

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...