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The State of Digital Quality in 2023

Rob Mason
Applause

The digital landscape is continually evolving, and as businesses strive to provide exceptional user experiences, digital quality becomes a critical factor in ensuring customer satisfaction. The State of Digital Quality report from Applause examines real-world testing data to shed light on the most common flaws in digital experiences across various industries, including digital banking, streaming media services, wearable devices, online shopping, and voice-activated devices. In this blog, I'll delve into the key statistics and insights revealed by the report, offering guidance on how organizations can improve their digital quality and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Understanding the Flaws

According to the report, functional, visual, and content defects make up over 90% of all bugs discovered. This highlights the need for a rigorous testing approach that addresses these key areas during the development process to ensure a smooth and seamless user experience.

Emphasizing Accessibility

Accessibility remains a significant concern for digital products. For the second consecutive year, 65% of the identified accessibility bugs were attributed to screen reader errors. Addressing accessibility issues is not only a matter of inclusivity; it directly impacts customer satisfaction and market reach.

Tackling Payment Processing Challenges

One of the critical insights from the report is that 80% of all payment bugs were categorized as "functional." Such issues indicate that certain aspects of transactions couldn't be completed as intended. As digital transactions become increasingly prevalent, ensuring a seamless payment experience is paramount for retaining customers and avoiding revenue loss.

Localization Errors on the Rise

The report draws attention to the rising incidence of localization errors, which accounted for 73% of digital quality defects related to missing or poor translations. This increase of 8% from the previous year highlights the importance of providing accurate and culturally relevant translations to engage international audiences and build trust.

Impact on Customer Satisfaction and Business Performance

Underscoring the significance of digital quality, the report reveals that unresolved defects and friction points along the customer journey can lead to adverse consequences for businesses. Digital shopping cart abandonment, missed conversions, customer service complaints, low customer satisfaction, and negative ratings can all significantly impact a company's bottom line.

Best Practices for Enhancing Digital Quality

Drawing from the report's insights, several best practices emerge for companies seeking to improve their digital quality:

1' Invest in Comprehensive Testing: Adopt a holistic testing approach that assesses various components of a digital experience to gain a deeper understanding of customer engagement.

2. Prioritize Customer Journey and UX: Create frictionless and accessible customer journeys across all touchpoints and payment methods by testing with real users in real-world scenarios.

3. Test Across Diverse Devices and Networks: Given the variations in device behavior, test across multiple real-world combinations using crowdtesting to ensure broader coverage.

4. Adopt a Solid Testing Strategy: Document test cases and results, and implement quality management practices to create scalable and repeatable processes.

By focusing on areas including accessibility and localization, organizations can significantly improve customer satisfaction and ensure long-term success. As new technology and innovations continue to advance, a commitment to prioritizing quality testing from design, through development, and deployment is critical.

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause

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The State of Digital Quality in 2023

Rob Mason
Applause

The digital landscape is continually evolving, and as businesses strive to provide exceptional user experiences, digital quality becomes a critical factor in ensuring customer satisfaction. The State of Digital Quality report from Applause examines real-world testing data to shed light on the most common flaws in digital experiences across various industries, including digital banking, streaming media services, wearable devices, online shopping, and voice-activated devices. In this blog, I'll delve into the key statistics and insights revealed by the report, offering guidance on how organizations can improve their digital quality and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Understanding the Flaws

According to the report, functional, visual, and content defects make up over 90% of all bugs discovered. This highlights the need for a rigorous testing approach that addresses these key areas during the development process to ensure a smooth and seamless user experience.

Emphasizing Accessibility

Accessibility remains a significant concern for digital products. For the second consecutive year, 65% of the identified accessibility bugs were attributed to screen reader errors. Addressing accessibility issues is not only a matter of inclusivity; it directly impacts customer satisfaction and market reach.

Tackling Payment Processing Challenges

One of the critical insights from the report is that 80% of all payment bugs were categorized as "functional." Such issues indicate that certain aspects of transactions couldn't be completed as intended. As digital transactions become increasingly prevalent, ensuring a seamless payment experience is paramount for retaining customers and avoiding revenue loss.

Localization Errors on the Rise

The report draws attention to the rising incidence of localization errors, which accounted for 73% of digital quality defects related to missing or poor translations. This increase of 8% from the previous year highlights the importance of providing accurate and culturally relevant translations to engage international audiences and build trust.

Impact on Customer Satisfaction and Business Performance

Underscoring the significance of digital quality, the report reveals that unresolved defects and friction points along the customer journey can lead to adverse consequences for businesses. Digital shopping cart abandonment, missed conversions, customer service complaints, low customer satisfaction, and negative ratings can all significantly impact a company's bottom line.

Best Practices for Enhancing Digital Quality

Drawing from the report's insights, several best practices emerge for companies seeking to improve their digital quality:

1' Invest in Comprehensive Testing: Adopt a holistic testing approach that assesses various components of a digital experience to gain a deeper understanding of customer engagement.

2. Prioritize Customer Journey and UX: Create frictionless and accessible customer journeys across all touchpoints and payment methods by testing with real users in real-world scenarios.

3. Test Across Diverse Devices and Networks: Given the variations in device behavior, test across multiple real-world combinations using crowdtesting to ensure broader coverage.

4. Adopt a Solid Testing Strategy: Document test cases and results, and implement quality management practices to create scalable and repeatable processes.

By focusing on areas including accessibility and localization, organizations can significantly improve customer satisfaction and ensure long-term success. As new technology and innovations continue to advance, a commitment to prioritizing quality testing from design, through development, and deployment is critical.

Rob Mason is CTO of Applause

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In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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 ...