April 5, 2011
Guest post by Eran Yaniv, CEO and co-founder of Perfecto Mobile
Global brands face numerous challenges when it comes to reaching customers. Users want access wherever, whenever, and by whatever device they choose. If brands want to succeed in their mobile strategies, then they must focus on total user access rather than application development for certain mobile products. That sounds a lot easier than it feels to companies faced with a fast-moving mobile landscape. With an ever-increasing number of smartphones, tablet computers, operating systems, screen sizes, and carriers to consider, brands face a serious challenge in insuring their mobile offerings are functional and enticing for every user. Cloud-based application testing provides a cost-effective, efficient and reliable method for reaching every user.
Optimizing the user experience
As brands fine-tune their mobile plays, they are struggling with a real estate problem. Users looking at iPhones, Androids, Galaxys, and iPads see very different screen sizes and shapes. Businesses must consider how their mission-critical pages will look vertically or horizontally. Will the call to action be compelling on a small screen as well as a larger one? Will users struggle with the shopping cart when they access it with one handset rather than another? How can a retailer test for every possible scenario to safeguard the experiences of all its users?
The answer lies in the cloud. Software-as-a-service testing options deliver a secure platform by which testers and developers can easily access hundreds of real mobile handsets and tablets connected to live mobile networks spread in different geo-locations. Moving their pre-launch activities onto a cloud-based service like this allows brands to easily determine how their websites, shopping carts, and other applications will appear to users on a wide range of screen sizes.
Cloud-based mobile testing gives brands easy access to and full control over a wide range of smartphones and operating systems so they can avoid implausible or limited physical testing and unreliable simulation testing. Instead, they test applications on real devices that integrate seamlessly with existing development environments.
The mobile cloud also provides all the automated services that brands require, including regression testing, stress (repetition) testing, porting to different platforms, and performing custom repetitive test scenarios. Such automation helps populate reports that identify areas in need of improvement. Additionally, a mobile handset cloud gives developers and marketers the means to enhance collaboration to include direct access to mobile handsets and test scenarios between globally distributed teams.
Testing for every scenario
By helping enterprises perform more tests in less time on countless devices over every possible global carrier and network location, the cloud boosts service quality, shortens time to market, and enhances the experience for every user, not just those who choose from a limited list of devices. The bottom-line result for businesses is the ability to react quickly to the dynamic mobile landscape with innovative offerings and services that drive new revenues and enhance market standing.
Consider the case of a global brand serving an international user base. Such a company succeeds or fails based on customer experience. With the ability to tap into real devices via the Web, the company’s application developers can take screenshots to review performance on hundreds of devices. It can share and record user sessions to inform and empower teams in the creation of more functional features. Additionally, testing in the cloud lets the brand respond to application bugs in real time and boost quality before live launches.
A company performing this kind of test might write several hundred user stories to stringently test performance before certifying applications. The cloud lets them do all this with maximum efficiency and without breaking the bank or messing up time-to-market schedules.
Better customer care is better business
In order to deliver the kind of customer care that consumers demand in competitive markets, brands have to be able to deliver the best mobile experiences and have the ability to troubleshoot quickly when those experiences are compromised. In essence, retailers must have access to all the devices customers might use without taking on the daunting, expensive task of acquiring them. The cloud lets brands sidestep the burden of building device stockpiles so they can focus on customer care.
Another hurdle for retailers is speed: they must deliver quality applications and they must do so quickly. Oftentimes, this means delivering mobile offerings via app stores. Cloud-based testing can cost-effectively speed the time and ease the burden of qualifying for inclusion in app stores. The process of submitting, certifying, and publishing applications can take weeks or even months with traditional testing scenarios (like simulation, etc). Through mobile handset cloud-based testing, however, businesses can avoid costly rework scenarios, bringing better applications to stores in a matter of days.
In order to get into most app stores, brands need to test their applications on the physical handsets that are relevant to each app store, seek individual store certifications, and wait for the stores to do their own retest. The mobile handset cloud helps speed up this process by automating development and certification, and then provides ongoing monitoring capabilities to ensure superior application performance in multiple regions.
A mobile strategy that works for global brands
Regardless of where they live and which mobile devices they use, customers are all the same in one respect: they expect the brands they patronize to deliver excellent mobile experiences. Retailers who want to tap into mobile shopping habits must give users attractive, functional, easy-to-use applications, regardless of the devices they own. The dynamic mobile marketplace presents some challenges to that mission, but brands can overcome those hurdles by moving testing processes to the cloud and optimizing the experiences of all mobile users.
About the author:
Eran Yaniv is CEO and co-founder of Perfecto Mobile. He was previously vice president of product marketing at Comverse America. Prior to Comverse, he was the general manager of the Valisys Quality Management business unit in Tecnomatix, as well as the director of R&D in Tecnomatix Ltd. in Israel.
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