Asad Khan is the founder & CEO of LambdaTest, an AI-powered unified enterprise test execution cloud platform.
All of us want a seamless digital experience. Customers expect a sleek and flawless website or app, and businesses want to deliver intuitive design and seamless UI. However, the truth is, if you skipped visual testing in your release, your web or app experience may seem riddled with minor inconsistencies and layout issues to some users, ultimately leading to a loss of sales.
Why Visual Testing Matters
Visual testing goes beyond ensuring the right aesthetics for your app/website. It’s a strategic investment with several benefits.
• Boost conversion rates with a well-designed UI. Visual testing is your best friend when it comes to identifying and resolving UI issues that can create friction in the user journey. For instance, a button that is too small to click on a mobile device or a form that looks cluttered visually can hurt your conversion rates. According to Justin Mifsud, founder of Usability Geek, “88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.”
• Catch bugs early to help reduce costs. According to NIST, fixing a bug post-release can cost 100 times more compared to before the release. For instance, if a critical bug like a misaligned button or a missing payment field in your checkout process goes unidentified until launch, it can lead to a flood of customer support tickets and lost sales. Visual testing helps catch these UI bugs early in the development cycle when they’re inexpensive and easy to fix.
• Deliver seamless experiences across a pool of devices. Over 61% of the market share is dominated by mobile devices. So it’s important to ensure that your app/website is not only flawless on desktops but also on mobile. Visual testing allows you to simulate your UI across different devices. This ensures that your UI renders as close to perfectly as possible on every platform, delivering a positive experience for all users.
• Improve accessibility for everyone. Visual inconsistencies can make it difficult for users with disabilities to navigate through your UI. Imagine struggling to read text due to color contrast issues or feeling confused due to misplaced labels. Visual testing can identify such issues early on, making your web/app inclusive for everyone. This will not only fulfill your ethical responsibility but will also ensure that your app reaches a wider audience.
Exploring The Nuances Of Visual Testing
Visual testing can often face challenges with dynamic content—for example, live feed and user profiles, which can further introduce noise and obscure the true state of the UI. In such cases, using techniques like element masking or ignoring specific regions can help by excluding these fluctuating areas from visual comparisons, but these also require careful configuration to avoid missing important changes.
Another issue is false positives. These typically arise from slight variations in font rendering or anti-aliasing across different browsers, which can lead to wasted development time on irrelevant discrepancies. Advanced tools with tolerance levels and perpetual similarity algorithms can mitigate this challenge by allowing for acceptable variations and simply focusing on how these elements would appear to the human eye rather than exact pixel matching.
Embedding Visual Testing Into Your Testing Workflow
Visual testing is most effective when combined with other testing methods like exploratory testing. By leveraging the following steps, you can create a robust testing strategy based on your needs:
• Prioritize. When getting started with visual testing, it’s important to understand that not every UI element needs pixel-perfect matching. Focus on critical elements that directly impact the user experience like navigation menus, buttons or forms. Also, test the most common user flows to ensure a seamless experience at every touchpoint.
• Choose the right testing tools. Based on your specific project needs, consider important factors like budget. For instance, there are free open-source tools, but cloud-based tools offer scalability at a cost. Think about your needs: Do you just need basic pixel-perfect comparisons, or do you need advanced features like masking dynamic content and AI-powered anomaly detection? You should also ensure that the tool integrates with your existing workflow and tech stack.
• Establish baseline references. Before starting visual testing, start with capturing screenshots and recording videos of your ideal UI on different devices or browsers. As your UI evolves, smart baselining and version control systems like Git help keep these visuals up to date, ensuring efficient maintenance and the ability to revert to earlier versions when needed.
• Integrate with your development workflow. Aim for continuous integration and continuous delivery by integrating visual testing into your CI/CD pipeline. This will allow for automated testing after every code commit, catching regressions early on and preventing them from reaching the production stage. Further, you can use visual testing tools’ APIs to trigger tests and receive results within your development environment.
• Leverage advanced features. As an additional step in enhancing your testing accuracy, use advanced features like element masking to exclude dynamic content and perpetual similarity algorithms to minimize false positives from minor variations. Consider using AI-powered anomaly detection for proactively identifying UI issues beyond pixel-level comparisons.
The Future Of Visual Testing
With AI coming into the picture, we can expect visual testing to be more intuitive and efficient. Additionally, AI will act as a design critic, identifying color clashes and readability errors. This approach will proactively save developers time and effort as AI automates baseline updates, discerning between minor tweaks and major UI changes.
The future of visual testing will be a perfect blend of human expertise and AI, ensuring flawless UIs and user experiences that are intuitive, accessible and optimized for business success.
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