The best (and worst) digital customer experience in Australia

Over the past year Jackdraw has scored 195 of Australia's leading brands — across superannuation, general retail, fashion, fast food and furniture — on the same two axes: what a brand has built (coverage) and how well it's executed (quality), each against 13 established UX frameworks with a source behind every number.

Look across all five industries at once and the same three patterns hold, every time.

1. Everyone has built the features

On coverage, the field bunches tightly at the top. Averages sit between roughly 78 and 89 percent, and the leaders are near-perfect: Kmart scored 100 percent of the criteria we measured in retail. Search and filters, saved carts, click-and-collect, buy-now-pay-later, an app, a loyalty program — the feature list has quietly become a checklist, and nearly everyone has ticked the boxes.

Having the features, in other words, is no longer the achievement it once was. It's table stakes. Which means it can no longer be where brands separate.

2. Quality is the moat

On experience quality — how well all that functionality is actually executed — the field spreads out. Same features, very different experiences. And the brand with the most features is rarely the one with the best experience: Kmart built 100 percent of the criteria we measured and sits mid-pack on quality, a reminder that coverage and quality are different things.

The brands that lead do it by executing what they have with discipline, not by building more. In superannuation, Australian Ethical tops experience quality at 84. In fashion, Mister Zimi leads at 84 — and THE ICONIC is the rare all-rounder, pairing 99 percent coverage with a top-tier 83 on quality. In retail, Decathlon does the same, topping experience quality at 92 while sitting near the top on coverage too. In furniture, IKEA leads on both axes — the field's broadest coverage paired with its best experience, at 89.

The widest opportunity sits with the brands that have built plenty of coverage and have the most headroom to lift the experience to match. In fashion, some brands score in the mid-80s on coverage while their experience quality still has room to catch up, sometimes a gap of thirty points or more. That gap between what a brand has built and how well it's built is the whole opportunity.

3. Accessibility is the universal blind spot

The most consistent finding across every industry is also its biggest shared opportunity. Accessibility is the weakest area in every sector we've scored, without exception, running from 34 percent in fast food to the mid-50s in super and retail. No industry has cracked it yet, and no other part of the experience has as much shared headroom.

That was easy to ignore while accessibility was a "should." It no longer is. The EU Accessibility Act came into force in 2025 with a real standard — WCAG 2.1 AA — and it reaches any business selling to EU customers, which includes a great many Australian brands. The universal blind spot has quietly become the universal legal risk. It's also, for the brand that fixes it, the clearest available edge.

What it means for you

If you're benchmarking your own experience against the market, the lesson is simple: stop counting features and start measuring quality — and treat accessibility as the differentiator it now is. Coverage tells you what you've built; it won't tell you whether customers can actually use it well. The gap between the two is your roadmap, and it's usually shorter and cheaper to close than building the next feature nobody feels.

That's what a benchmark is for: not a vanity leaderboard, but a map of where the experience is quietly winning or losing. Because the details others miss are where the experience actually lives.