Applitools Centra Connects Design and Development to Deliver Better Customer Experiences

Applitools, provider of the next generation test automation platform powered by Visual AI, announced the launch of an Early Access Program for Centra, a new tool designed to connect teams across the product delivery lifecycle.  Centra will be free to use for teams and anyone visiting Applitools.com will be able to sign up immediately for the waitlist.

As the modern application UX continues to evolve, the design to development handoff process continues to challenge even the best frontend teams. It involves a growing number of stakeholders across different teams, like product, marketing, legal, and others, making communication cumbersome and slow. Now available for early access at no cost, Centra connects teams across the product delivery lifecycle to track, validate, and collaborate on user interfaces at every stage of the process, from design to implementation.

“The pace at which design, development, QA, operations, marketing, and product teams ship their work continues to accelerate – creating new challenges around communication, collaboration and validation across the UI workflow,” said Gil Sever, co-founder and CEO of Applitools. “Applitools Centra helps teams ensure the exact experience that was meant for users is what makes it to production. We are launching Centra as a free product intended to benefit any size software development team as part of our mission to support faster releases of higher quality applications.”

Designs and mockups, from tools like Figma, are uploaded to Applitools Centra and compared against implementations in local, staging, or production environments. Every team involved in the process can then validate that the user interface (UI) looks exactly as it was intended, collaborate with others on the team and share feedback on the design and implementation.

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According to a Gartner report, “To deliver an engaging UX for customers and employees, software engineering leaders must overcome the divide between development and design. To do this, you need people with inspiration and the communication skills to bridge the gaps between development and design.”[1] However, collaboration and communication between design, development, and product management teams is entirely broken. These teams typically work in silos, using different systems, throwing requests and feedback over the wall to each other, spending precious hours going back-and-forth. They also lack insights and historical context around UI revisions, leading to miscommunication and repeated mistakes. This cumbersome cycle results in a UI that disappoints end users and stakeholders.

With Centra, every team involved in UI creation and implementation is united on one platform that makes communication and collaboration simple. Teams that use Centra can see benefits like:

• Better applications resulting from collaboration from all the different stakeholders at an early stage: Teams from different functions across the design-to-experience process communicate over the interfaces they will ship. Product managers, designers, and developers all have equal visibility into what makes into production.

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• Less UI Drift Between Design and Experience: Compare designs and mockups to web implementations at any stage in the release cycle, ensuring that brand compliance is kept to the highest standards and that user experience is impeccable.
• Design as Documentation: Disseminate designs as a single source of truth across teams. Quality Assurance (QA) teams know exactly what interfaces are supposed to look like during validation, ensuring that the source of truth doesn’t drift over time.
• Better Visibility of Changes Over Time: Track the history of design artifacts and compare them to production for deep insights into the evolution of UI over time. The history of implementation also provides teams with context and understanding of what worked or didn’t in the past.

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