As we know that today websites and mobile applications cater to 90% of the business requirements of any organization, however, the look and feel take the spotlight as it’s the first impression to any users. As per the stats, more than 60% of the users uninstall a mobile application because of the complicated or distorted user interfaces. The user interface is the backbone or the first impression of the website or the application, hence User Interface testing is crucial, and any miss in it can cause a huge loss! While performing UI testing, factors like consistency, usability, visibility, accessibility, and compatibility are considered as major. So before diving deep into these factors let’s understand what is UI Testing.
What is User Interface Testing?
The UI Testing or GUI Testing is performed to test the graphical user interfaces of the application. Testing is performed to check whether all the graphical user interfaces like the menus, buttons, icons are working fine, text visibility, design structure images are properly fixed. Also, the aim is to check whether all the above-mentioned functionalities are working as per the specifications. A website is the integration of various source codes which is not visible to the user, but the graphical user interface is what visible to the user hence a lot of emphases is put on the design and images or videos of the website in order to attract good traffic and develop strong branding of the web or mobile application.
The major factors that are considered while performing user interface testing are usability, look and feel, and error. Let’s discuss them one by one.
Usability
The application web/mobile is majorly for building interaction between the organization and the user. Make sure that your website is user-friendly for example the menus and the navigation are very simple, easy to understand. All the functions must be very easy to use and understand. One of the most common examples would be that all the pages should have an option to navigate quickly to the home page so that the user does not get lost in the website. Having a drop-down feature for all the menus and submenus makes the navigation simple and easy. Hence while creating a website, a lot of stress must be placed on making it user-friendly.
Look and feel
How the website looks, is the first impression we make to our customers. The colors, logo, branding, eye-catching are all the factors that play while testing the website for look and feel. The color, look, logos, etc play a major role in creating branding or “identity” of your product. Hence one needs to be very careful about deciding the look and feel of your website.
So while testing the website for the look and feel we need to test whether all the fields are clearly visible, it should not be complex, and whether all the color combinations match the requirements.
Errors:
Checking errors for GUI testing is a long and tedious process. While testing for the GUI testing checks the following things :
- Check the size, measurements, and color of the elements like the forms, buttons, etc
- Check if the form elements are allowing the letters or numbers in the respective fields.
- Check whether all the functions are working as intended
- Check if the error messages are displayed properly
- Check if the font used is clearly visible
- Check if the alignment of the text is correct
- Check for the image’s clarity and if they are correctly aligned
- Check the positioning/alignment of the elements for different screen resolutions
Responsive design testing
Responsive web design testing is crucial nowadays, as we do not want our customers to be device bounded while using our web application. A responsive web application is one that can be used on any device. A responsive web design fully meets the needs of the users and is displayed without any problems while using the application on any device. Not performing responsive testing for an application would tend to break the complete web page of an application with distorted UI. Hence responsive web design is crucial for having a good UI experience. Even cross-browser testing is performed to ensure a responsive web design. The cross-browser testing ensures that an application is compatible with all combinations of devices, browsers, and operating systems. Hence browser testing helps you make your website compatible with various devices.
Conclusion
GUI testing is crucial if you want your online shop to be customer-friendly. As per the records, the UI of a website helps in increasing the conversion rate and retention rate by multiple folds. Hence all application-centric organizations are looking for technical solutions to provide excellent UI testing. Whether it’s a mobile or a web application make sure that your mobile testing and web application testing suites include various methodologies of UI testing to ensure an excellent and seamless user interface.
