Quality keeps a user: How to deliver higher quality UX with test automation

Robert McNeil

October 28, 2024

In today’s hyper-competitive market, where users have countless options at their fingertips, one truth stands out above all: quality keeps a user. The quality of your product, particularly its user experience (UX), directly determines whether customers stay with your brand or leave for a competitor. As your business evolves an exceptional UX is crucial – achieving this starts with a thoughtful approach to test automation.

At its core, investing in quality assurance (QA) practices, like test automation, not only secures the functional success of your product but also has a profound impact on user retention, revenue, and overall business growth.

Our team recently explored this at our annual SmartBear Connect Virtual event (watch on demand recordings here). This customer-driven event gathers the best in the industry to push boundaries, collaborate with peers and make each release better than the last. Together, we dove into the impact proper QA practices can have on an organization.

In this blog, we’ll further explore the direct relationship quality has on user experience, why it’s important to prioritize more than just functional UX enhancements, and how failure to adequately test growingly complex apps can undermine your company’s potential.

How does UX impact user engagement?

To grow in a competitive digital landscape, businesses have long prioritized producing functional products as fast as possible, assuming that if the product is working it would automatically succeed. And for a while that was how you got ahead – to be the first in the market!

But we’ve entered a new digital age where users are more informed and more connected than ever. Your product must do more than just “work”; it must work better, faster, smoother… and be even prettier than before! To put it plainly: Users today have exceedingly high expectations.

When considering how your app should stand out – the quality of the user experience has become the differentiator. Consider the following stats on how good or bad UX can affect your business:

Customer Churn

Bad – 70% of mobile app users abandon apps due to slow load times
Good – 74% of website visitors are more likely to return because of good UX

Customer Referral

Bad – 13% of customers will tell 15+ people about a poor user experience
Good – 23% of people will tell 10+ people about a positive user experience

Customer Loyalty

Bad – 89% of people will shop with a competitor following a poor user experience
Good – 80% of people are willing to pay extra for a better UX

To put it simply, app quality has a direct impact on your business – good UX keeps customers engaged and loyal, bad UX pushes customers to your competitors. But what does it mean to deliver a “high quality” application? To answer that, we need to consider what experience your customers are looking for in the first place!

What does quality mean to an app user?

It’s not enough to make sure your app works – it needs to satisfy your user’s need for a smooth, efficient, and engaging experience. That’s why when you approach testing, you should factor in more than just functional and unit tests in your suite.

To know which tests are right for you, first identify all the ways in which a user might want to engage with your app. What experiences can lead to a boost in revenue? What can lead to severe outages if left unchecked? Here are some examples of poor UX and how they might impact your users:

Poor Performance or Load Times – Users don’t like down-time (remember CrowdStrike?) – if your app runs slow, they will quickly seek out alternatives.
Clunky Navigation – Users have ample examples of what a truly smooth experience can be; you will be compared against them – whether fair or not.
Interface Options – Users engage with you from multiple mediums and have different expectations in each. When individual mediums perform better than others, users may question your ability to meet their needs on a regular basis.
Repeated Bug Encounters – Users don’t know whether a certain experience is a flaw or a feature until they visit again; users can tolerate flaws so long as the flaws go away in a reasonable time.
Ingenuity – More and more, users are innately tech savvy and seek new and novel experiences from their apps. Having a stand-out experience from the get-go gives you more chance to create a stickier client.

No app is completely immune from bugs – but by considering all the ways in which your users might be unhappy with your app, you can identify the necessary tests you need to run. For instance, if you can anticipate high-usage days that might affect your load times (e.g. Black Friday) then you should incorporate load testing into your approach.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Testing teams are already overburdened with test requirements, so adding more isn’t a simple matter. This is where examining more comprehensive test automation comes into play.

How to achieve full-scale test automation

Both manual and automated tests are important and offer unique benefits, so it’s important to factor in both. Staying 100% manual does give you a level of control over the process, but leaves you with time constraints. Conversely, achieving 100% automation isn’t ideal either – while you can become more efficient and consistent, you’d also lose testing depth and the human touch necessary to truly understand your users.

As you get started with test automation, take the time to examine all of the different types of tests you want to run and how automation can be leveraged to help you deliver on quality.

What is test automation?

Test automation is the process of using software tools to run pre-scripted tests on a software application before it is released into production. By automating the repetitive, time-consuming parts of the testing process, you can focus more on the work that leads to better quality.

Getting started

To get you started, let’s look at various aspects of your testing process and discuss where automation can help.

Unit and Functional Tests – They make up a significant portion of your test requirements, and ultimately will confirm “your app works.” This is where most teams start with automation, and the scripts tend to be shorter and easier to automate.
Device and Browser Tests – Testing across different environments is crucial, especially for mobile testers. Automation can be useful here to address your test scale, helping you take a common unit or functional test and replicating it out across all the environments you wish to test in.
Visual Regression Testing – Scanning your UI for display bugs not only helps present a quality front to your user but can reveal issues not caught by your functional tests and can also be crucial for accessibility testing. Automation here can be beneficial for highlighting changes that occur over releases, especially when that automation is also savvy enough to eliminate false positives.
Performance or Load Tests – Adequately simulating load is typically expensive and challenging to do manually, so automation has often played a role here. The challenge here is that load testing is often project based, and those scripts still need to be created manually. The additional use-case for automation here is in preventing that manual work each time you need to run tests by simply converting your already-made tests into ones designed to test for performance.
Test Management – As your company grows, so will your testing requirements and ultimately your testing organization. When this happens, automation will become essential for keeping teams efficient by sharing test cases and maintaining better visibility between teams.

Investing in UX is investing in growth

If your product delivers a superior user experience, it’s not just your users who benefit – your business will too. Positive experiences lead to stronger customer loyalty, more word-of-mouth referrals, and higher customer lifetime value (CLV). By prioritizing quality through test automation, you are making a direct investment in your company’s growth.

Still not convinced? Consider the following:

For every $1 invested in UX, users can expect a return of $100 (that’s a 9,900% return on your investment)
Improving UX by just 5% boosts profit and customer retention by 25%

How to maximize your test automation potential

The development landscape is at a crucial inflection point. Your users expect more, and their expectations will only continue to grow. Investing in UX improvements through test automation is not just about staying competitive; it’s about ensuring the long-term success of your business. SmartBear helps you secure that success with the Test Hub by giving you greater automation coverage in a single place.

Comprised of popular tools like TestComplete, Reflect, and Zephyr – Test Hub helps users of any skill level automate more types of tests and gives testing teams the means manage growing workload without losing visibility.

Along with the API Hub, Test Hub, and Insight Hub – SmartBear offers you the tools you need to deliver unprecedented app experiences for the strongest customer base. Talk to our sales team today to learn more.