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The Importance of UX and QA for a Startup | Furlough Mastermind - read the full article about Quality Assurance 2021, QA Testing and Quality assurance from Furlough Φ on Qualified.One
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Lets get this party started. All right, are we excited? I hope so no worries, we are going to over deliver as promised. And make sure you guys walk away with some great insights and great value, how UX is a company effort and on an individual effort, and no one, it goes down to UX and QA, they go hand in hand. And thats a lot about the session were going to talk about today. You made a comment not so long ago about how your best QA person is the CEO, right? Id love for you to share some insights and thoughts on that.
QA is like quality assurance, and we expect this individual to come into a company, and kinda fine tune and polish older funnels, channels and assets. Now, just think how big it is. Even on the content level of content strategy. I have writers, I have editors and proofreaders. I have developers and designers and I have SEO. Six different people are working on one post, right? If they missed something, I expect that individual to step in and tells me so its like everybody does QA and the person who does QA more than anyone else is the CEO. You know why? Because hes under the most stress, whenever something is wrong. Hes the first one who gets fired for it. Im speaking this from experience, this is what you do all the time. And I see Joe is having that experience as well. When youre a CEO, youre constantly looking at whats not good. Youre constantly checking, like, Where can I improve? Its a constant evaluation of every tiny aspect of your company. Its never ending. So QA in general, like UX is a company effort. And for me, I expect designer to tell me if there is a typo, they noticed I expect the copywriter to tell me if the strategy is not on point. And I expect the developer to tell me that the blog is sh*t. I do want that collaboration to be from head to bottom still, QA is a CEO role.
It really is. And weve had I mean, Im hiring QA teams, where Im going to go into some of the software that use checking out different browsers and checking out, you know, different devices to have the mobile, you know, iPhone, Android, and going through these processes. And yet, some of the people that are doing QA, its not necessarily a high position role. But you know, the CEO, the CMO, those higher levels have the ability and skill sets to identify broken parts of the funnel that maybe a QA person cant do. So how often should you do QA? This is constant.
Its for every day, every day, Ill open the site, every time theres a major update, always check your products, always check your flows, if it was growing 3, 4, 5 people a day, why for the past two, three days, my email list hasnt grown, QA, reverse engineering, and figure out exactly whats happening. Now what is the difference between quality assurance and user testing, okay, and user testing, basically examining how real people perceive and use your site or software, youre exploring the points of these visitors what they do what they dont understand. With UX studies, you understand how users actually scan a website, if you have elements on your websites that lead to unexpected visitor reactions or points of friction so that they cant continue to go down their funnel. This user testing allows you to do updates through your UI and UX to ultimately allow them to go continue down the funnel. User testing really does understand how visitors experiences on the site differ from what the intentions of the developer are. Now, how can you do some user testing? One of my favorite tools, Hotjar, it can pull up heat mapping, it can pull up recorded sessions, it can even pull up scroll data, understanding where you slow down because the big headings actually capture certain information. And thats where the eyeballs go, which can lead them deeper into the funnel and nurture your audience. Now, user testing, its by far... Ophir, are there any other tool you could recommend? I personally love SmartLook.
Yandex metrica, thats a free heat mapping tool for you guys known as the Russian Google. QA, Its pretty straightforward, as we discussed, examines the site itself, youre looking for bugs, issues, errors, broken links, broken buttons, points of friction, thats where you want to ultimately do you want to put yourself through the funnel, you want to go assess to create a cleaner, faster, better site that works the way that the developer intended. One of the easiest things to do QA is you say, Well, I have this audience person that comes to this page. And the goal is to end up at this thank you page, signup form, go and type it see what email comes your way. Do it again for a different form and just constantly do that. And its actually quite a simple task that is just not done by most, especially, a company as a whole and a company that does care. Okay, and I truly believe the reason why the CEO the weight of QA falls on him the most is because the CEO cares the most. And traditionally, you know, the companys team theyre not really interested in checking if the funnel works and things like that unless theyre really trying to prove their point that they care about their this business and and want to grow within this organization.
So what are some cool QA tools? Im very familiar with Browser Stack, Just a couple of comments about QA. In QA, you want to try and doing what Browser Stack does, and it allows cross-browser testing. Okay, as you guys can see from this graph, you can go into iOS, Android, Windows XP and older versions, you can actually choose different browsers, right from safari to Firefox, and Chrome and so on. And understanding Wow, okay, my site is not responsive for this stuff that is a little outside of the natural behavior we tested, browser on this device. And you can go ahead and improve the actual experience. This sounds like a lot to do QA. But thats why we have incredible tools. Like as simple as Google Analytics, Google Analytics, you can see and pull up how many of your users are mobile, desktop and tablet. And on top of it, lets say you have an eCommerce Store, you can focus specifically on QAing, your highest returning pages, right? I dont really care too much about focusing all my efforts in improving the contact page. As you can see, it only gets 4000 web viewers a month. But my homepage has 24,000. My all products page has 11,000. These are the pages that you want to put on, I would most likely look at the homepage on mobile, and put my efforts there and slowly go down the list of the priorities. After Im finished QAing all the top pages, I would then go ahead and switch to desktop and check it there.
Ill just give you an example. We found it in eCommerce website that I managed, our approach was always to take a look at conversion. And once we see a job is like Im going to start checking everything, Im going to start sending CS fulfillment guys, everyone is going to check the website and see whats not working. And what we found, for example, is that if Im adding a certain type of product to the cart with another type of product, the automatic discount is being rejected for some reason. So we have a promotion going. But if Im buying one product with another, its not working. And youll be surprised it took us more than a day to find it. But I mean, you want to check literally every scenario, because its very hard to tell what doesnt go right when you dont know it.
I mean, weve had similar experiences as well, when we had an affiliate program. So every affiliate had a unique coupon code and one of the junior instead of doing an affiliate when typing in the coupon code, they put a storewide code, and we had to shuffle between 500 different coupons, trying to figure out whats causing the store to break. In this case, it was actually another Junior, who was like all the sites are 90% off whats going on. And we all all hands on deck and went to QA and figure out how to fix this bug.
So perfect time to lead to the next point is what makes this a company effort. And the reality is whats a company made of? Its made up of your team. And your team can comprise of editors and writers.
And your editors and writers are most likely gonna QA the copy.
Theyre going to QA the forms. These editors are going to QA the images and the context of the copy in the sense of the site. The developers are going to QA most of the stuff that you see here from speed to the 404 pages to the navigation, making sure things work, the responsiveness, making sure its mobile friendly, making sure that when you go from desktop things stack appropriately, instead of stacking on top of each other, which is actually a common issue.
You have your SEO team. This is a whole other team, which the SEO team, theres only a certain type of person that can really do QA and understand, you know, title tags, metadata, the sitemaps, the structured markup, which is overlooked a lot. The structured markup, the schema markup. QA isnt always just checking how your brand is presenting on your site. But its also understanding how its showing up on directories and search engines just like Google or Yelp. SEO team is usually spearheading that local SEO traffic from these directories. And this is some part of that QA process. Last but definitely not least, of course, as marketers, you know, everything else kind of falls on us. So...
A lot of times we have a lot of big titles for stuff and roles. If you care about what you do. If even if youre cleaning, youre going to check what youre doing and make sure that its done right.
Otherwise, youre not really doing it good. So the same goes here. And because its a multi department company like anything, especially on digital its multi company effort, I still think that QA lies mostly on the executives, shareholders and owners also do QA and whoever works with business owners knows that they constantly keep on reaching out to you about it.
Absolutely. In this company that I used to have as a client who just IPOed on the New York Stock Exchange for about $200 million. It is a fifth of a billion dollars that they just IPOed and went public. First thing that we got that client was simply by going to their website, looking at the phone number, calling the phone number and it went to their lawyers office instead of a customer service line. Imagine being an investor of that company, just doing a nice no-mystery shop, just understand the customer experience of what the company youre invested in. And finding out that the number gets redirected to the law firm, which they can close a sale. How much money is left on the table simply by little issues and mistakes that happen on a site.
Lets hear it. How do we feel? I know we kept it light that one super impactful, though, and cannot emphasize or stress the importance of QA and the importance of, you know, going back to what Ophir said is, it does happen at that executive level, that Chief positions but when people who are not in that role, and theyre just starting off, maybe as a junior, or in a managerial position, start identifying these issues and presenting it. This is how you get on the good graces of those executive people.
Like depends on where you are. Theres a lot of companies, especially executives that are lazy on companies that dont want to grow, theyre cool of the position of being passive and okay, the company doesnt work, you know, I mean, the product is not good. This is how you can recognize a good company to be in and a company that makes moves, because theyre receptive to feedback. Theyre open to improve where they come off short, like, I know, for example, that some of my friends leaving companies very big roles. Because of that, they come to the CMO and like, listen, dude, we have a lot of holes in our marketing plan in our marketing efforts. And the CMO is to filled with his own ego, so hes not open to get that feedback.
If this is what you see, run away, this company is not going to succeed. Even if the CMO is amazing. It doesnt matter. Its a mindset thing. QA is a big word for giving sh*t about your business. If you give a sh*t, constantly check, question and improve Absolutely, Guys love to hear it. Love to see it. Lets make some noise one more time. Guys.
Furlough Φ: The Importance of UX and QA for a Startup | Furlough Mastermind - QA Testing