The Role of QA in Enhancing User Experience

The role of quality assurance is critical to delivering a great experience for users. Many aspects of the QA discipline are intimately tied to the experience that users have with the software or application, which in turn affects usage, subscriptions, retention, purchases, ratings, and other factors essential to success.

Today, we explore some key ways why QA drives a better user experience.

Working Software = Happy Users

One of the most commonly thought of purposes of software quality assurance is functionality testing. Functionality testing is about validating that the software or application works the way it is intended. If a user is supposed to be able to add products to their cart, make a purchase, and receive an order confirmation, it is a pretty poor experience if somewhere along the way that breaks.

In many ways, the root of functionality testing helps ensure the user’s experience matches their expectations, and that’s the foundation for good usability.

There are many other ways QA performs a great service for usability, so let’s look at them.

Compatibility is Consistency

It can be incredibly frustrating to enjoy a great experience on the desktop version, then find an incredibly slow, bloated experience when using mobile. Or, imagine you upgrade your phone and find that the app you used to love now breaks and becomes virtually unusable. It’s annoying and will likely cost your business significant revenue.

Compatibility testing is a key part of software quality assurance. It’s all about ensuring that the experience and functionality of the software work the same across different operating systems, browsers, or devices. It’s a great way to ensure that all the hard work your team has invested in delivering a great experience is carried through to your users, regardless of what technology they use.

Working at Scale

Sometimes the base of the application is functional and compatible. The core issues have been found, and the experience is frictionless.

However, due to some infrastructural problems, the minute you add thousands of users all trying to do the same thing at once, the performance degrades and becomes unusable. Suddenly thousands of people making purchases find themselves redirected to pages that indicate errors, or buttons just stop responding.

These are not great experiences.

Load, performance, and scalability testing are all about stressing the system out as much as possible by simulating multiple users and interactions. It attempts to find the breaking points that a software system can handle and ensure that it is field-ready for when the masses interact with it. This testing approach keeps the app highly usable even when there’s high usage.

Automation and Responsiveness in Market

While it may not be the most obvious contributor to usability, release velocity is an important aspect of meeting the needs of users. Practices like test automation accelerate the release cycle and allow developers to receive rapid feedback on new features.

When the software delivery cycle is accelerated through the aid of test automation or CI / CD delivery, internal teams can be far more responsive to the feedback and requests of users. It becomes far easier and quicker to implement fixes and push desirable features to production.

As an organization, a great experience isn’t just what you put into the world on your first try. It’s how well you listen to the feedback of your users and how effectively you respond. Test automation can make all the difference.

Think Accessibly

Digital accessibility testing is a specialized focus within the umbrella of quality assurance. It’s chiefly concerned with ensuring that users of all abilities or capabilities can access the same experiences. Done right, accessibility testing ensures that many different kinds of users are able to have a great experience with your software or application.

Many kinds of accessibility testing practices also inherently benefit overall usability. Some accessibility best practices include simplifying workflows, ensuring that information is easy to understand, or giving users multiple ways to complete tasks based on their needs or preferences. In turn, this can seriously enhance usability for all users and make your application easier and more enjoyable to use.

Iteration and Improvement

Quality assurance, especially in the context of agile development, brings about a healthy discipline of iteration and improvement. When QA is engaged in refining acceptance criteria upfront and supplying regular feedback to developers and business analysts alike, this communication becomes a vehicle for continuous improvement.

That focus is incredibly healthy as it improves the likelihood that all members of the development cycle are going to think about quality and delivering the best experience possible. It also accelerates the rate at which improvements are made and lowers the risk that serious issues are discovered late when they’re more costly and time-consuming to resolve.

Unwritten Requirements

A great tester does not just test according to what’s written in the requirements. A great tester thinks about the end goal of the user and the purpose behind the application. They then bring their creativity and exploration to find all the areas that might impede that goal and purpose.

Great testing involves thinking through all the interactions that might have been missed or forgotten, comparing that against industry experience for similar apps, and uncovering what might go wrong in the real world. Thinking through and testing based on how a user, or many different users, might truly interact with your software or application in the real world can make all the difference in delivering an exemplary experience, and it often does.

Get Local

There’s a classic example of the importance of localization in the 1994 movie Pulp Fiction. John Travolta’s character Vincent is discussing his trip to Europe and notes that in the United States, the burger chain McDonald’s sells a “Quarter Pounder.” But as Vincent points out, the French use the metric system, so the sandwich is referred to as a “Royale with Cheese.”

Humorous for sure, but the reality is that the impact and appropriateness of what we say and do changes based on the cultural context. Enter localization testing.

For QA teams, localization testing is about testing an application from the lens of different locales or regions to ensure that it’s culturally appropriate. It may involve ensuring language settings are correct, that phrasing or language use is appropriate, or that common expectations of interaction (for instance, left to right or right to left reading) lead to a frictionless experience.

Ensuring your experiences are localized is vital if you want to deliver a highly usable experience across many regions.

Deliver Great Experiences

Time and time again, quality assurance serves as a vital backbone to the usability of an application. The function it serves, both in its immediate activities and in the culture it creates when done right, can orient an organization to be highly user-centric and deliver experiences that keep people coming back. In a world where everyone has an app or website, delivering that great experience might just be the thing that makes the difference.

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