Getting Your Organization to Buy in to an Effective Testing Program

The success of your website launch is predetermined and can be quite accurately predicted based on the nature of your testing program. If you aren’t testing, you can pretty much expect trouble! True, it costs money and precious resources to test; so, how do you get your organization to buy in to having a robust testing program?

The Cloud Gives Us Tremendous Capability, Making Testing all the More Important
With cloud technology, it is possible for a large enterprise to have hundreds of websites, each with its own individual brand. Without a standardized infrastructure, it can be a recipe for disaster.

There was a major pharmaceutical company we worked with that had 300 websites coordinated by Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), with each site being its own individual brand. Their infrastructure wasn’t standardized. Sites were used by patients and doctors, and the development teams couldn’t keep up with the demands for changes. They cut corners, stopped testing and using best practices, and the platform became very unstable. They suffered from infrastructure sprawl, and there was no governance on the platform — everyone wanted everything immediately, so there wasn’t a willingness to test and validate the experience first.

Performance and the end-user experience suffered, and the high-quality code base provided by AEM was rendered ineffective. We straightened them out, but not before the launch was a massive failure.

Testing on Healthcare.gov didn’t start until six days before launch. An anonymous source close to the site’s development team said the project suffered from a “lack of an end-to-end business and technology vision for the project,” and that “the hardest part of any technology project is not the technology — it is the business process decisions, what is the system supposed to do and how it will it do it [sic].”

Get Your Organization Onboard Without the Pain of Failing First
Remember, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

1. A pilot test can reveal unforeseen challenges that might arise during implementation. Correcting problems before launch will be much cheaper than the expensive scramble that could ensue after launch when customers try to engage with and learn about your company and even make purchases.
2. During testing, you might learn that a change in strategy could result in increased sales and customer satisfaction, especially preferences within a diverse visitor and customer base.
3. Testing gives your teams opportunities to practice working together before launch, building important relationships and workflows.
4. Testing protects your brand. Customers will equate a lack of relevant engagement, errors, and downtime with your company’s image and ability to deliver its promises.
5. “If you’re struggling to communicate the value of testing to your management or fellow team members,” says Christine Perfetti, usability testing expert, “stop explaining the benefits and start demonstrating them. I’ve yet to see a test where the design team fails to gather some new piece of valuable information about the users’ needs.”
6. Help your organization understand that testing doesn’t have to be a big deal. Start with three or four users and begin gathering data.
7. Alleviate the fear that testing will disrupt schedules because it could drive major design changes before launch. Rather, make testing part of your company culture — and do it from the beginning — testing every module and every integration as part of the normal workflow.

Testing all aspects of how customers connect with your company — the customer journey — ensures that you have thought about and understand your customers’ needs. Customers today are digitally sophisticated and demand a high level of performance from the sites they choose to patronize. You have less than 15 seconds to convince your customer to stay at your site — and your competitor is just a quick finger swipe away!

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/getting-organization-buy-effective-testing-program/