Within the travel and tourism industry, providing a seamless user experience across multiple channels is a major lever for success. In this article, we will explore the 5 ways crowdtesting, as Quality Assurance (QA) solution, is enabling hotels, airlines, other companies to tackle their application testing and website testing needs in order to unlock a first-class user experience.
Enhancing the User Experience with Crowdtesting
Today, the travel and tourism industries rely heavily on digital services like websites and mobile applications. As a result, having a pristine user experience is vitally important. Luckily, crowdtesting is a major QA solution enabling companies to properly test their customer-facing mobile applications and websites to produce a great user experience.
1) Testing Across All Channels or Services
Providing a consistent and seamless user experience across all channels is a major requirement for many industries including travel and tourism. Travelers today often interact with a company across multiple channels. In fact, according to a Google/Ipsos study, about 94% of leisure travelers switch between devices as they plan and book a trip. When accounting solely for the booking process, 31% of leisure travelers and 53% of business travelers said they have made travel arrangements using a smartphone.
As a result, many in the industry continue to work to create excellent customer-facing services that provide an excellent user experience. Services such as websites, applications, and even chatbots enable customers to easily plan, book, and manage their trips using their preferred channel.
While developing high-quality digital services can be time-consuming and expensive, providing a first-rate user experience across all channels is essential and plays a key role in customers’ decision-making process.
According to a 2019 Travelport survey, 71% of travelers cited the quality of the user experience as a key factor in their decision-making process when booking flights, while over 50% cited the quality of the digital experience as a key factor when booking accommodations.
As a result, it is vital for companies to properly execute UAT campaigns. Without thorough testing, it is certain that applications, websites, and other services will be hindered by the presence of anomalies or bugs that can block key functions, frustrate users, and put your business goals at risk.
Here, crowdtesting enables companies to plan and execute UAT campaigns for any digital service using a community of freelance, QA professionals.
What is also beneficial about crowdtesting is that it helps companies overcome a major testing challenge: the lack of testing devices or the budget to purchase testing devices. Since crowd testers use their own smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc., test cases can be executed without limitations or spending a ton of money to purchase testing terminals.
In the end, crowdtesting will enable you to thoroughly test all of your customer-facing services to guarantee a great user experience.
2) Multilingual Testing
Within the travel and tourism industry, having multilingual websites and applications is essential.
The challenge facing many companies, however, is testing websites, mobile apps, or chatbots across multiple languages. Without an internal multilingual QA team, it is nearly impossible to test multilingual digital services.
Crowdtesting makes it easy to test any customer-facing digital service using freelance, professional testers who have the right language skills. Crowdtesting even makes it possible to execute tests in specific markets to account for certain varieties of a language such as American English vs British English.
At StarDust, our crowdtesting community, We Are Testers, is composed of over 4,000 QA professionals across 120 countries speaking 45 different languages. The diversity of We Are Testers facilitates multilingual testing by making it easier to build a multilingual testing team for your UAT campaigns.
Pointing out mistranslations, grammar mistakes and other language-based issues, in addition to functional bugs, can go a long way towards improving the user experience and avoiding embarrassing mistakes that push people to leave your website or mobile app in search of a better user experience.
3) Testing with Objectivity
The ability to objectively test applications and websites is crucial as it ensures that testers do not miss bugs, anomalies, or other issues as a result of their biases or knowledge of the digital service. In fact, knowing too much about an application, for example, can make it harder to uncover more subjective bugs that, if left unfound, will ultimately negatively affect the user experience.
Therefore, it is never a good idea to ask developers to perform the tasks of QA testers. The developers' knowledge and understanding of the application, for example, will compromise their ability to test the application with the proper level of objectivity.
Crowdtesters, on the other hand, provide the right amount of objectivity. By remaining independent from your development team, crowdtesters are able to objectively test applications, websites, or any digital services and uncover bugs that can block key functionalities and taint the user experience.
4) Performing Cross-Device Testing
Given the fact that many travelers will research information and purchase tickets or accommodations across multiple channels, it is important to test applications and websites across multiple devices and configurations. If not, companies run the risk of creating an inconsistent user experience that can lead to lower conversion rates and higher customer acquisition costs.
In particular, cross-device testing can be a challenge for companies that lack a large internal library of testing devices across different configurations. Performing cross-device testing is especially important when testing applications and websites due to the fragmentation and diversity of the smartphone market.
Without access to a variety of devices or configurations, it is nearly impossible to properly test applications or websites using the smartphones, operating systems, and/or browsers most frequently used by your customers.
Companies must also take the proper steps to produce applications and websites that load quickly, while also providing a clear and easy-to-use user experience to prevent customers from leaving their site or application.
In fact, a survey conducted by Google/Ipsos illustrates this point.
Crowdtesting helps companies overcome this problem. What crowd testers bring to the table is a diverse collection of real testing devices (smartphone, tablets, computers, etc.) and configurations (model/OS/screen size, etc.) that are necessary to properly test your mobile applications and websites.
Not only does crowdtesting make it easier to test your digital service using specific versions of mobile operating systems, but it also makes it possible to execute tests using specific devices or configurations that are only popular in certain countries or regions.
By choosing crowdtesters who possess the right testing resources, cross-device testing can be performed with confidence.
5) Testing with Flexibility
Last but not least, crowdtesting provides the flexibility that companies need to execute UAT campaigns in the face of various constraints.
It is common for unforeseen problems to arise that create delays, raise project costs, and place greater pressure on development and QA teams.
When this happens, test phases can often become watered down or moved to later sprints in order to help keep the project moving along. In the end, this can lead to a snowball effect that ultimately hinders the user experience.
With testers located all over the world, it is easier to execute UAT 24/7 to provide the quick and thorough results that development teams need. As a result, we at StarDust, along with our crowdtesting community, have the capacity to plan and execute UAT campaigns, and provide test results very quickly to help your projects stay on schedule.
To see if crowdtesting is right for your QA needs, please do not hesitate to request a quote below or to download our white paper to learn more about crowdtesting.
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