How confident are you that your app, website or product is ready for release?
It’s easy to focus only on the good side of things before release, all the while ignoring potential defects that could hurt your app’s popularity and severely damage your company’s reputation.
QA testing is one of the most important aspects of any application’s release process.
It prevents bugs from ruining your app’s user experience, user interface problems from irritating your users, and embarrassing mistakes from hurting your reputation.
Despite this, QA is also one aspect of software development that’s frequently neglected, even by some of the tech industry’s biggest brands.
Below, are three examples how poor QA testing damaged a company’s reputation.
The Apple Maps Disaster
By far the most infamous QA-related public relations disaster of the past five years was Apple’s 2012 release of Apple Maps.
Aiming to limit its dependence on Google software, Apple released its answer to Google Maps.
Like almost all Apple products, it looked great, with a stylish user interface and beautiful design aesthetic. When it came to function, however, Apple Maps fell seriously short of the mark.
Due to a lack of QA testing, the app directed users seeking train stations into the middle of the ocean and turned elevated highways into bizarre distorted messes of pixels.
The first version of Apple Maps was such a disaster that technology writer David Pogue called it “the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.” The disaster that followed the release even prompted CEO Tim Cook to apologize for the buggy application.
Prior to the release of Apple Maps, Apple had built a reputation for quality that few others in the technology industry could match.
All it took was one buggy, poorly tested release for the reality distortion field to wear off and for others to realize that even Apple can make mistakes.
Windows ME
Microsoft’s Windows Millennium Edition (better known as ME) was supposed to prepare home computer users for the 21st century. Instead, due to poor QA testing and a rushed release, ME was a buggy mess that barely lasted a year before being phased out in favor of Windows XP.
Windows ME was such a PR disaster that has since become the benchmark for buggy, poorly tested software.
Several factors contributed to Windows ME’s disastrous reputation. The operating system was difficult for users to install, with a lengthy list of hardware compatibility problems. It was also a buggy mess after it was installed, with frequent “blue screen of death” errors.
After realizing how poorly Windows ME had been received, Microsoft quickly stopped selling the operating system and focused on the development of Windows XP, which it released less than a year later.
Perhaps more than anything else, the poor reception of Windows ME contributed to Microsoft’s reputation in the early 2000s as a “buggy” develop — a reputation that still persists today as the company continues to improve Windows 10.
Intel’s Pentium Math Error
In the mid 1990s, Intel’s Pentium processor was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in terms of processing power. Unfortunately, QA mistakes created an embarrassing incident when some Pentium chips couldn’t perform division accurately in numbers with five significant digits.
While this glitch only affected a small percentage of Intel’s target market, it did huge damage to the company’s reputation as a manufacturer of precision CPUs. Intel’s response to the crisis did little to calm customers — instead, it hurt the company’s brand even more.
Instead of offering to recall the affected CPUs, Intel made customers prove that the error had a negative effect on their ability to perform work. The company worked directly with the scientists and engineers affected by the glitch and eventually provided replacements.
While the damage from this scandal was short lived, it did immense damage to Intel’s brand, as the company had previously built a reputation for precision and quality. Once again, a small and easy-to-miss quality error had serious issues for a previously pristine brand.
Is your QA testing process sufficient?
Even the smallest quality mistakes can have a significant negative impact on your brand. If your app is unstable, a resource hog, or plagued with embarrassing UI errors, it can damage your reputation and cause people to forget about your past successes.
The key to ironing out bugs, glitches and other problems in your product is a strict, effective QA process. Create your own affordable, results-focused QA team and you’ll protect your brand from experiencing a similar PR disaster to those listed above.
