April 11, 2022
Enterprises are quickly adapting to digital transformation driving the future of their business. With more customer interactions and increased expectations, and faster cycle times, enterprises are facing huge competitive challenges to remain relevant in their market. This trend has drastically shifted the role of testing and quality assurance (QA) to be more strategic.
The share of digital products in enterprises’ portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years, according to McKinsey. High-performing enterprises recognise that there is a direct correlation between user experience (UX) and better business outcomes. Modern consumers, especially digital natives, have high expectations regarding their digital interactions, and are quick to find alternatives when those expectations don’t pan out. PWC data suggests that 1 in 3 customers are willing to leave a brand after just one bad experience. Clearly, a lot is at stake.
UX is a key component to building an application or website or embarking on a digital transformation journey. Modern testing helps enterprises measure UX, looking across a variety of factors that may lead to poor customer interactions, so that businesses can correct course as needed. UX can be a deciding factor in the success or failure of an enterprise’s path to digital adoption, and in turn for its customer outcomes.
Building a strong backbone
Quality software and applications are the backbone of a superior digital customer experience. Taking a proactive approach by planning for quality at the beginning of new projects, while testing early and often throughout the development lifecycle, is critical to making sure your customers’ experience is so elevated that they will remain loyal to your business.
It’s important to consider quality broadly when thinking about the user experience. Functional, reliability and performance testing are the table stakes, but let’s look at some of the other key aspects of assessing and enhancing the UX that should not be overlooked:
1. Usability testing. Usability, sometimes referred to as UX Testing, seeks to measure the ease of use and user friendliness of the application, with testing often performed by real users. It measures the intuitiveness, ease of navigation, and how easily and quickly users can meet their objectives on the application. Usability testing helps one know how actual users will interact with the app before the launch so that the experience and performance can be improved.
2. Resiliency testing: Chaos engineering, while not yet mainstream, is quickly emerging as a way of testing reliability and resiliency that is especially suited towards today’s modern, highly distributed and complex applications. According to the Gremlin State of Chaos engineering report, enterprises that run chaos engineering experiments frequently have greater than 99.9% availability of their systems.
3. Security testing: When customers choose to perform an interaction online, it stands to reason that they need to have trust in the security and confidentiality of those interactions, in particular when those transactions involve personal, financial or other sensitive information. Security testing assesses for vulnerabilities, threats and risk of the application in question, which is especially critical in sensitive industries like healthcare, financial and citizen services.
Modern testing supports superior customer outcomes
A testing approach incorporating the above practices provides a more comprehensive basis and means for assessing and improving application quality, resulting in better customer experiences and improved business outcomes. Traditional testing practices that focus primarily on functionality, reliability and performance are not enough. Enterprises today must protect the entire customer experience if they are to attain superior customer outcomes.
Next-generation, customer-centric testing and QA approaches will shape testing practices to focus on customer engagement channels, supply chain and customer touch points. Today’s QA and testing teams must consider the entire customer experience to assure high-quality applications.