By making a courageous and quality-of-service oriented decision this summer, Orange Bank has shown the way forward. Initially planned for the 6 July 2017, the launch of the French mobile operator's new bank has been put back several months. The reason: prolongation of the testing phase for the mobile app. Basically, Chief Executive Stéphane Richard wants to "take as much time as necessary because [the operator cannot] allow the even the tiniest bug to be present." This decision reflects the company's desire to "refine and perfect the customer experience" before making the application available in the market. It is a courageous decision because it is rare thing to see a brand put back the launch of one of its services.
However, it is understandable:
- the public is waiting for the service
- the conventional banks have set the bar very high
- the neobanks are waiting to pounce, with many industry actors planning to launch or having already launched their own service to compete with Orange Bank
For Orange, therefore, just as for other businesses, testing is an essential process you have to go through if you want to guarantee an optimal user experience. In this article, we are going to take a look at how testing influences the user experience.
The consequences of a low quality user experience
Imagine you one day decided to release an application and it happened to be full of bugs. What effect would this have on your brand's image? The answer is simple: it would degrade your image and have a negative effect on the way people perceive the services and products you offer, no matter how exceptional they might be. And furthermore, a low quality user experience can have generally disastrous consequences:
Social networks enable information to be propagated to the greatest possible number of people at the speed of light. It is no longer just employees that are aware of the problems users encounter, but also, and potentially, hundreds or indeed thousands of other people. And also, due to a snowballing effect, one negative review can lead to others sharing their bad experiences.
A woeful user experience can hit you in the wallet: 60% of users will not return to a website once they have had a bad user experience. You will therefore see a reduction in your revenue, with your customers going straight to your competitors.
Aspects to take into consideration
In order to arrive at an optimal user experience for web visitors, you need to pay attention to the following:
the application or website's performance
Does my application/my website work properly?
the user experience:
Will people be able to learn to use my website/my application easily?
appeal:
Is my website/my application pleasing to the public?
In this article, we are going to focus on the functional aspects of the user experience.
Functional aspects of the user experience
Where functional aspects are concerned, businesses should pay particular attention to:
- performance
- bugs
- responsiveness
Performance
Nearly 53% of web users abandon websites if they take more than three seconds to load. Patience may well be the mother of all virtues, but people are not willing to wait. Users expect pages or applications to load or start up more rapidly.
Bugs
With such a diverse range of mobile devices now available, bugs are inevitable. This is a fact. But minimising their number is absolutely necessary in order to ensure there is no negative impact on how comfortable the website is for the user and their level of satisfaction. Additionally, there is also the risk that there will be an effect on the level of confidence users are able to have in your website/your application. Example: A person visits your website with the intention of purchasing something but is unable to add it to the cart. An error message is displayed. Initially frustrated, this person then begins asking themselves questions: "Will my order be properly recorded and processed if I manage to add the item to the cart? What about when I reach the payment stage? Will I also encounter a bug then?" Swayed by this lack of confidence, they abandon the cart.
Responsiveness
Users are fives times more likely to abandon a website if it is not properly adapted to work with the format of the device used. You will therefore need to ensure the page content is properly adapted to the various different mobile formats and browsers.
This means it is necessary to provide a consistent, matching experience across all the various different types of screen. It is of little importance which one an individual user happens to choose. If the specific experience is mediocre, the entire user experience will be impacted.
So where does testing figure in all this?
Testing the user experience is not just about testing a website's user-friendliness. From both a functional and a technological point of view, and by ensuring that none of the three aspects above has a negative impact on the user experience, testing will enable you to improve the quality of the application/website.
The role testing will fulfill is that of differentiator. By implementing tests, you differentiate yourself from competitors who operate purely by intuition and do not believe that the user experience can be a source of increased revenue.
Functional testing will bring to light the kinds of performance problems that can affect the user experience (excessively long load times for example). .
Testing an application with a view to reducing the number of bugs enables you to provide smooth, high quality user experiences. By providing a memorable and engaging user experience, you generate customer loyalty.
And finally, testing the responsiveness of a website enables you to ensure it is properly optimised for all devices and browsers. To conduct this kind of testing, you can study how people view your website (smartphone? tablet? desktop?) via Google Analytics, thus enabling you to see what kinds of devices and configurations you should focus your tests on.
In conclusion, time and effort spent on the user experience, and therefore the customer experience, by implementing tests is the guarantee of both a profitable investment and money saved: it leads to loyal customers, a good brand image and, most importantly of all, satisfied customers.
"Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten." – Gucci
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