2024 State of Digital Quality Report From Applause Reveals Top Customer Experience Issues, Reinforcing Need to Strengthen Software Development Processes

“This year’s report uncovered a range of challenges that arise when development teams aren’t looking beyond basic bug fixes”

One such pathway is adopting digital quality frameworks, which help organizations assess their progress toward achieving comprehensive digital quality. This year’s report adds new frameworks for artificial intelligence (AI) and user experience (UX) testing, detailing the core capabilities, practices and processes teams should consider as they navigate different levels of quality, from emergence through excellence.

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Key report findings:

• Operational oversights, like lack of attention to planning and measurement, span every testing area. In an attempt to speed up releases, resource-constrained development and QA teams often overlook the processes, documentation and measurement tools that are key to unlocking high-quality digital experiences. Fewer than one-third of organizations (28%) have comprehensive end-to-end testing processes and documentation that are used consistently. Many QA teams also have an incomplete picture of their performance, with only 55% tracking customer-centric KPIs.
• Despite the fast-approaching European Accessibility Act (EAA) deadline, accessibility testing still lags behind. Issues could be remedied with a shift-left approach that tackles accessibility testing earlier in development, over 60% of accessibility issues still come from poor development for screen readers – the most commonly used assistive device. Organizations need to move beyond simply conforming to standards like WCAG 2.2 and EAA to providing fully inclusive, high-quality experiences for all users.
• Providing a seamless user experience is a vital differentiator, particularly when it comes to generative AI (Gen AI). 27% of Gen AI users have abandoned an AI service due to UX and performance issues. Organizations failing to recognize the UX imperative and invest in usability testing risk losing their competitive edge, especially in the ever-evolving AI sector. AI companies that excel in quality integrate UX testing into their QA process and adopt other best practices for AI quality, such as red teaming, real-time anomaly detection and continuous retraining programs.
• Payment testing and localization go hand in hand and are essential to customer retention. Organizations need to test all aspects of the customer journey and consider regional differences like language, currency, preferred payment methods, cultural norms, local taxes and more. 41% of consumers encountered an issue that impacted their ability to make a payment recently and 52% of consumers have abandoned an app due to poor localization. In-market testing with real users and payment instruments can help mitigate these issues and ensure revenue collection.

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“This year’s report uncovered a range of challenges that arise when development teams aren’t looking beyond basic bug fixes,” said Luke Damian, Chief Growth Officer at Applause. “Organizations need to ‘shift left to get it right’ and can leverage digital quality frameworks for areas like accessibility, AI, payments and UX to set attainable goals for achieving excellence. In markets like ecommerce – a trillion-dollar industry – organizations leave money on the table if they’re not embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle.”

At a minimum, organizations must incorporate functional testing into their QA process. While automated functional testing continues to improve thanks to advancements in AI, there is no replacement for manual functional testing – the process by which testers verify digital experiences operate as intended by executing test cases. Companies that excel at digital quality also address the complexities of specialized testing areas (e.g., nuances of the customer journey, emerging payment methods, accessibility laws and assistive devices) to ensure apps, devices and experiences not only work, but work well for all users.

The 2024 State of Digital Quality report is created from a representative sample from the company’s testing data collected last year, spanning 748,000 test runs in 70 industries and 156 countries. It also draws on data from its 2024 Digital Quality Benchmarking Surveys, which look at levels of testing maturity across organizations from various industries globally.

Over the next few weeks, Applause will release content on the State of Digital Quality for key industry vertical segments, including retail, media and telecommunications, finance, travel and hospitality, health and fitness, and B2B software.