When designing a graphical user interface, there is always an open question: How do we automate testing for it? And how do we make sure the website layout stays responsive and displays correctly on all kinds of devices with various resolutions? Add to this the complications arising from dynamic content, requirements for internationalization and localization, and it becomes a real challenge.
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Cross-browser testing is time-consuming and laborious. This, in turn, makes it expensive and prone to human error… so, naturally, we want to do as little of it as possible. This is not a statement we should be ashamed of. Developers are lazy by nature: adhering to the DRY principle, writing scripts to automate things we’d otherwise have to do by hand, making use of third-party libraries —... Read More
Product teams in startups and mid-sized and large companies are all implementing
usability testing and prototyping as a way to de-risk product development. As the focus shifts from engineering to prototyping, it is becoming increasingly important for anyone who creates prototypes to understand the differences between a prototype and a product build.
By optimizing the prototyping... Read More
The incredible growth of mobile and the proliferation of mobile devices has made the UX designer’s job more challenging and interesting. It also means that user-testing mobile apps and websites is an essential component of the UX toolkit.
But unlike the desktop environment, no out-of-the-box software packages such as Silverback or Camtasia are specifically designed to record mobile... Read More
It was the summer of 2013 and I was working on a project for my employer, Box. I had just finished wiring up JSDoc as a nightly build using a plugin to detect T3 patterns in our code and document them automatically. It occurred to me that these patterns might be easy to get wrong, and I started looking for a way to automatically detect incorrect patterns. I immediately turned to JSHint because... Read More
For many months, your entire team has worked their butts off to create an awesome mobile app. Finally, with your team exhausted and excited, it’s showtime! But then, your dream app turns into the ultimate nightmare: Eager customers download the app, use it once and never return. All the sacrifice and months of hard work — wasted. What went wrong?
Your app has become another victim of the... Read More
1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store and another 1.5 million in Google’s Play store. That’s a lot of apps, and for a growing number of mobile users. An average user in the US will download only three new apps per month (at best), according to comScore’s “US Mobile App Report.”
Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing... Read More
Although Windows Phone usage is still low compared with other browsers it's sometimes necessary to test your web work for Internet Explorer Mobile. For web developers, this could be a complication. Testing for the Windows Phone environment is not always optional, but it can be a chore — especially because the version of Internet Explorer that comes with the Windows Phone can be quirky at best.... Read More
Testing responsive websites is a laborious task. Until now, implementing a stable and maintainable automated solution for cross-browser and cross-device testing of a responsive layout has been nearly impossible. But what if we had an opportunity to write visual tests for responsive websites? What if we could describe the look and feel of an application and put this directly into our tests?
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