Amid the largest congress in the mobile industry starting next week, the levels of excitement are not without justification when the Mobile World Congress arrives in Barcelona. The MWC in 2013 proved to be a massive success for the 72,000 people that were in attendance, and it seems that the event this year is no exception.
Produced by the GSMA association, the organisation of the event is to once again be executed with absolute precision.
Along with the online portal ‘My MWC’, the GSMA have provided the attendees with a mobile conference app. This onsite interactive tool provides access to the complete event information, whilst impressively holding 13 in-app features. All with the intention to save you time before, during and after the MWC event.
Like so many event applications, a good organiser can be essential, especially with an event the scale of Mobile World Congress. In order to find out what people think about the GSMA app, Testbirds have used the concept of crowdtesting to evaluate it…
With more than 4,000 different existing models of Android devices alone, it has become more and more difficult for the developer to ensure all of their intended users have a consistent experience with their apps and websites. This problem is heightened even further when a target group is proven hard to access during the development stage. Therefore, can a company really trust the reliability of internal testing alone? The lack of sufficient devices, organisation blindness and biased results, are all common problems that continue to rise with modern day testing.
With the overly competitive app industry, even the smallest of defects may determine whether the user decides to return to the application or not. In a matter of seconds, these kind of decisions multiplied on the thousands of devices, can have a detrimental effect on the success or failure of an application. Therefore the importance of both quantitative and qualitative usability testing for customer loyalty is critical. Even more so, when an app is associated with an event that has an overwhelming amount of exposure. Therefore, problems found with traditional testing, can be solved by deploying the additional concept of crowdtesting.
The basic concept of using a crowd offers the idea of distributing a specific problem to a certain group of people without prior knowledge of the subject but with the training to be able to assess the issue. The investment of external crowdtesting, can help free an in-house developer’s time to ensure it is spent on the user experience of the application.
Furthermore, user expectations are continuously rising as more apps are of the same nature are competing. As a result, usability feedback from the crowd is more authentic and unbiased, which can be positively applied when ensuring websites and apps are tailored to end-users. In Europe, there are a few crowdtesting providers such as Testbirds, who have built testing platforms to handle crowd-based test projects for software.
The following results are summarised below:
The group of testers consisted of people between 26 and 56 years old, from 14 different countries representing the sheer diversity of MWC attendees. A total of 28 bugs were found during the test, ranging from low severity to critical. The most critical bugs were app crashes. Bugs of high or medium severity were comprised of malfunctions including inability to use the search function. The app was positively perceived as easy to use, with an average rating of 4.9 out of 6 points and when it came to testing the design, the average rating was also good, attaining 4.7 out of 6 points. Yet, the exhibitor listing was recognised as aesthetically unappealing with many company logos missing. A few testers mentioned that a graphical map of the event was absent, making it hard to locate exhibitors.
Testers also had difficulties comprehending the colour coding scheme in the event schedule. Although they found the colour scheme easier to understand in the graphical mode they were not aware of the different view options. As one tester noted, “although the overall app was easy to understand, some areas like the event schedule were confusing’. One suggestion would be to include a menu explaining what the colours represent.
In summary, the test has demonstrated the increasing importance of external testing using ordinary members of the public. To be able to use their own devices, operating systems and browsers in their own environment ensures quality unbiased testing that is necessary during the development stage of an application. The test case results emphasize the point, that despite the sheer size and exposure of a company or event – bugs and usability issues may still appear unavoidable. Testing is therefore considered crucial to ensure websites and apps are tailored to your users.
