Digital Transformation: The Best Expertise You Have is Your Experience

Everywhere, the talk is of turning the whole world digital. We all want to accelerate the process, and while I am all for it, I want to discuss one aspect of the digital transformation which has grown out of my personal experience.

Initially, my career path developed primarily via product testing – both functional & conceptual - so here is my question … is it possible to take general know-how and use it in such a specialized area as testing of digital products?

Let’s agree that in most organizations, the teams which are doing quality assurance testing and certification are mainly focused on the functionality and capabilities according to the defined business requirements of that particular product. Aesthetic and other ‘intangible’ considerations come low down on the list of their priorities. But when the product hits the market, it’s the customers who are interacting with these intangibles right away – the performance, look and feel of the product is way more important to them than whether it meets every last specification from the designers. This is what I mean by ‘experience’ – not expertise, but rather being street-smart, which is something you can only get by having been out there in the real world.

 Based on my own experience, customers (which basically I am as a consumer of products and services) are looking for :

• Ease of use – does the product match the need ‘out-of-the-box’
• Simple ‘go-with-the-flow’ logic – is there a step-by-step process from start to end without having to think (or worse still, guess) in-between those steps
•  Error handling – users should never see errors – this is the first principle of QA. Look at the great success stories of digital products and you will find that this factor comes very high on their customers’ endorsements. Did you ever see an error using Uber? I didn’t!
•  Clear and relevant (context-sensitive) instructions – something the customers will understand right away.
• It is fast? People do not like it when they visit portals or mobile apps which for every page load chews up bandwidth and as a result is slow. I wasn’t planning to go and order my coffee while the next screen loads.

To make sure all of this actually happens, the testing team need to have some fundamental principles, such as:

• Unlearn what they already know. Take everything that the tester already knows about the product out of the process, so that they are in effect working with it for the very first time – just like the customer will be doing.
• It’s a test, not a recommendation! Testers need to try to make the product fail, rather than try to prove that it works.
• Expect the unexpected – testers must ‘play dumb’. I am a human and may miss some step or required input, especially in the initial usage when I’m still learning. I am expecting this to be caught early and the mistake, and its fix, to be explained clearly. A good example would be “field X is mandatory but you have not entered anything” or “you omitted your date of birth”, not “data is missing” in the very last step when I hit the action button.
• Don’t just test in an ideal environment like a lab with warp speed connection. Go out into the street, or deep into a parking level, and see what happens there.
• Make sure it works anywhere, anytime and on the full range of possible connections.
• Test all the possible devices that your customers may be using, not just the ‘latest and greatest’ from the tech giants. Somewhere out there, people have older devices and technologies that they love, depend on or are locked in to. If you eliminate them as potential users simply because YOU haven’t done a good enough job in design and programming, then you deserve your fate at the hands of your competition who will cater for the whole spectrum of users.

And I could continue …

 So let’s agree that the question is relevant. Are we lacking dedicated teams that can certify our products with real experience – not just expertise. Do they work with the mindset of real-world consumers and their expectations? There are lots of people who design the journeys and their desired outcomes - I am talking about the testing part of it, to ensure that the dream becomes a usable reality for the consumer.

The accepted techniques of devops / agile-type capabilities, E2E testing, focus on integration etc. are great… but old school. What is needed is to take it up to the next level – how much can you automate such experience-related testing, how do you put feedback loops back to design and programming / production groups in case experience shows something is broken?

Some companies have created the role of CXO, but this on its own only indicates the maturity of the organization in terms of experience mindset. Typically, the CXO’s functions come either too early in the cycle, in setting overall goals of the user experience, or too late, in the role of gathering and evaluating feedback from customers. In the actual QA and testing phase, very few CXO’s have a defined and active role.

 In my view the testing and certification team need to have a kind of upgrade to their mindset. It is all about awareness, it is all about thinking like the customer – be the voice of your customer in your organization; protect your organization. Poor customer experience can kill more than just one product, it can spoil your brand. Good experience can increase loyalty so that you have a lead-in with new products. So don’t call it a ‘GUI defect’ and classify it as sev4; don’t take shortcuts on experience – it will be too painful and let’s face it, it is not that hard to make the certification process work – just remember to behave normally.