The user interface (UI) is the last frontier of differentiation for companies of all sizes. When you think about financial institutions, a lot of the services that they offer digitally are exactly the same. A lot of the services and the data they all tap into have been commoditized. What hasn’t been commoditized is the actual digital online experience – what it looks like and how you complete actions.

“Examined at an organizational level, a mature design thinking practice can achieve an ROI between 71% and 107%, based on a consistent series of inputs and outputs.”

The ROI Of Design Thinking, Forrester Business Case Report

The challenges of building UI

Modern UIs today are built by a diverse set of teams that work together at different parts of the process. The pace at which these design, development, QA, operations, marketing, and product teams ship their work is continuing to accelerate – creating new challenges around communication, collaboration, and validation across the workflow.

Getting from design mock-ups in Figma to live UI is a process that includes a lot of feedback and testing. It starts with the designer who passes to the product manager for approval before the developer can start building. Feedback in the development process requires rework to make those updates before it can get approval from the product manager. This is all before the testing team has even started their review.

You can see the game of telephone that’s played through different stakeholders into production, and we get something that’s slightly different at multiple levels. This makes measuring what actually happened and what actually needs to change incredibly hard, making it a huge burden on teams to ship clean UIs at a fast pace. Some of our main challenges here are:

• Lack of communication between the growing group of stakeholders
• Breadth of technology during implementation causing inconsistencies
• No continued source of truth across tooling as the app UI evolves

How Applitools Centra helps UI teams collaborate

Applitools’ newest product Centra is a collaboration platform for teams of all sizes to alleviate these challenges. Applitools Centra enables organizations to track, validate, and collaborate on UIs from design to production. Centra uploads application designs from tools like Figma to the Applitools Test Cloud. Then, Centra compares the designs against current baselines in local, staging, or production environments. Designers, developers, testers, or digital leaders then validate that their application interface looks exactly as it was intended.

Benefits of using Applitools Centra

• Less drift in the UI: By comparing design and implementation throughout the development lifecycle, teams can cut down on the amount of drift between design and production that occurs in their UI.
• Design as documentation: Disseminate designs as a single source of truth across teams so that QA teams will know exactly what interfaces are supposed to look like during validation. 
• Increased cross-functional collaboration: Teams from different functions across the design-to-experience process can all communicate over the interfaces that they are shipping. Product Managers, Designers, and Developers can all have equal visibility into what actually makes it to production.
• Catching bugs earlier: Shift left into design and catch bugs earlier in the SDLC – right at the moment of implementation, when the cost to fix is at its lowest.

Start using Applitools Centra

Check out the full demo of Centra in our announcement webinar. Centra is free to use for teams, and you can sign up for the waitlist to start using it on your teams.