Understanding Code and Quality Audits in 2021

In a world where digital is king, you may be forgiven for assuming that all digital experiences are created equal. Not only is that not the case – investing in the construction of your digital interactions is key to success – but also, the fight to stay relevant doesn’t end on launch day. Code audits and quality audits of your digital engagements are essential, in order to identify areas for improvement. As technology and the mobile landscape evolves, brands need to address its evolution and exceed customer expectations. If not, they will be left behind.

Audits are a quick way to determine potential quality, user experience or technical stability issues that are living within your digital property; the very that are causing users to uninstall your mobile app or decrease use of your website. They provide a detailed assessment of the online interaction you have created, with clear, actionable steps toward an improved overall experience. Bottle Rocket offers code and quality audits to help our clients maintain competitive advantage.

What are Code Audits?

Code audits involve a thorough review of your code against industry guidelines like those of Apple/Google or leading website best practices, while also assessing third-party libraries to recommend potential removal, updates, or replacements. The security of your applications is important, as should be kept in mind as the audits analyzes APIs and examine build configurations, permissions, and more. A good audit will also identify crashes and unexpected behaviors observed during everyday usage.

What are Quality Audits?

A quality audit should test across top devices and platforms, running over the full spectrum of possible scenarios your customers could experience. The most effective audits will use happy path testing, or ideal user flow, to assess the experience from start to finish. All specific features should be performing as intended, in both ordinary usage and unlikely scenarios. Of course, no digital experience is perfect 24/7, and negative testing for how the system presents error messages to the customer should not be neglected in a quality audit. It’s important during a quality audit not to get lost in your digital world, but test connectivity to mimic real world network environments. Every customer matters, and the circumstances in which they access your digital experience (and their reasons for visiting you in the first place) will all differ.

How Often Should You Carry Out Audits?

It’s a good question: annual and semi-annual updates are the norm for many businesses, following suit from the big application library players like Apple or Google as they update. But regular auditing of a company’s own volition is the way to stay ahead of the curve; this way, you uncover key issues in a timely fashion. Audits provide concrete, actionable insights to reduce friction in your digital experience, and they are really quick and easy to initiate and complete. 

Application aggregators provide industry wide guidelines, but updates are not one-size-fits-all: your company, with its specific goals, customers and digital offering, will have unique issues to address. Investing in regular code and quality audits is the best way to keep pace with, and leapfrog, competitors as you maintain the smoothest and most seamless digital experience possible.

What Common Problems Do Audits Solve?

Your mobile app might feel perfect to you, but customers using your services may pick up on minute issues that negatively affect their experience. And in a marketplace as competitive as it is today, where consumers have high expectations and multiple options to choose from for services, the smallest flaws can prove fatal to consumer-company relationships.

Did you know that 71 percent of users uninstall apps due to annoying push notifications popping up too frequently? Identifying this menace, and similarly irrelevant, off-putting content or in-app messages, will help greatly with customer retention and loyalty; and an audit will enable you to do this.

Another niggling issue that an audit can pinpoint and solve is poor loading speed, which can be extremely harmful to businesses if left unchecked. Most consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 79 percent of shoppers reported that they would not return to purchase from a slow loading website. Regularly auditing loading speed will help to hold onto impatient consumers who might otherwise head elsewhere.

Bottle Rocket is there for businesses who want to stay ahead of the pack when it comes to digital experiences. We understand that the key to customer retention grows from a proactive and forward thinking attitude towards code and quality auditing, and we are here to help you maintain a seamless customer experience.