Usability, UI and UX Testing: Everything You Need to Know

Every product is built with regard to the end user, and it is their comfort that software developers need to prioritize first. No matter how bright your idea was and how clear your code might appear, any product has a chance to break and turn out to be inconvenient to use. It takes just a few seconds for a frustrated user to abandon your app forever, find another, more appealing one, and write a galling review. To ensure your app strikes the cord with a client from their very first encounter, usability testing should always be a part of your software testing strategy.

The Essence of Usability Testing

Usability testing is a type of testing that encompasses a set of methods that evaluate how successful the interaction with an app will be for an end-user. It involves studying how real users perform tasks on a website and this, in turn, reveals the points for further improvement.

Among the rest of the QA activities, usability tests are deemed one of the most important because the rest of the work makes zero sense if a user can’t effectively operate an app. It’s necessary to perform usability testing before releasing an app to production and run it every time an app is updated to ensure that clients always enjoy beautiful interface icons and robust navigation of an app.

Major goals to achieve

In the process of usability testing, the QA team exerts every effort to attain the following objectives:

5 Benefits of Usability Testing

Every type of testing is a crucial step towards developing an impeccable app with the minimum amount of bugs. Besides being one of the main building blocks of a sturdy software foundation, the advantages of a thorough evaluation of an app’s usability include the following:

#1. Increased availability. It’ll help you adjust your app for different types of audiences with various backgrounds, native languages, favorite platforms, and browsers.

#2 Easy navigation. You can ensure that even a complex app is intuitive and simple to operate, and a user doesn’t need to undergo a long process of onboarding to learn how to finally reach the data they wanted in the first place.

#3 Enhanced consistency. Usability testing helps to achieve consistency across browsers and inside an app with all the features working soundly, images being displayed, and pop-up windows appearing just at the right time.

#4 Money saving. Detecting inconsistencies before release helps save money and reputation by quickly fixing them and presenting the end-user with a perfect product.

#5 Better user engagement. The more entertaining and reliable the features of an app, the more clients you’ll garner in the long run.

2 Types of Usability Tests

In broad terms, usability testing aims to check two integral facets of an app: its UX and UI. Both are interconnected and predetermine the successful functioning of each other.

UX is about the navigation of an app and the ease of the user’s interaction with its features. It covers everything from the layout to the speed of response time and even the appearance of the content of an app.

UI boils down to the consistency of an app’s features functioning, the response of buttons and menus to user input, and the colors, fonts, and shapes of every element of an interface.

The more sublime both aspects are, the smoother the communication between an app and a user is.

What Exactly Does UI Testing Include?

Considering that UI involves the appearance and proper functioning of every app’s constituents, UI testing evaluates every element a user interacts with, including:

• fonts and color schemes;
• hyperlinks;
• menus;
• progress bars;
• type-aheads;
• shortcuts;
• scrolling;
• size, length, and width of UI elements, etc.

Approaches Toward UI Testing

Until recently, UI could be checked only by a human, but the tech world does its best to reduce the scope of manual activities and let people concentrate on tasks of greater difficulty. So, today, just as with any type of testing, the evaluation of the UI can be performed either manually or automatically. Depending on the type of software, scope of work, and budget, a QA engineer can choose to complement both approaches or opt for only one of them.

Manual UI Testing

Manually inputting information and checking for discrepancies is a perfect choice for apps with a limited number of UI elements. However, the simple and effective process turns into a tedious disaster with an app that feature thousands of UI elements.

Automated UI Testing

Automated UI testing is testing performed with the help of a special tool that repeatedly runs tests. Basically, all a tester needs to do is write a set of tests for automation and maintain them. A tool, in turn, will perform all the rest of the evaluation work with greater accuracy, efficiency, and speed than a human tester.

5 Benefits of UI Testing

It may seem that testing the user interface is a rather insignificant step that can easily be omitted if the code is written by top developers. However, even the best coding experts make mistakes, and research conducted by Forrester shows that a good UI can increase the conversion rate by 200%. Besides amplifying your bottom line, by testing the user interface, you can achieve the following benefits:

Aesthetic interface

• being sure the color palette is as perfect as in the designer’s mind and every icon is clickable and in the right place.

Optimum quality

• having no doubts that all buttons and links are working and every feature is responsive.

Cross-browser consistency

• knowing that your app remains immaculate in all browsers, operating systems, and their versions.

Increased credibility

• imbuing clients with the understanding that you put effort into the visual perception of an app, and hence its security and usefulness.

Cost reduction

• Employing an automated UI testing tool will eliminate the chance of human error, quickly detect possible bugs, and save you money.

Tool for Automated UI Testing With No Code

The market is inundated with diverse tools for UI automated testing. Such an abundance can be both liberating and suppressing, for it’s so easy to fall for the colorful ads and sink a huge amount of money into a tool only to soon find out that the biggest part of its functionality is completely useless! Knowing all the concerns of business owners, a cloud-based tool for no-code test automation, DogQ, offers a free 14-day trial period that allows you to test the tool while testing your app!

Then, you’ll need to pay only for the precise number of testing steps you take and nothing above it. Besides UI, you can easily perform regression, smoke, and other types of testing.

By the way, you don’t need to undergo a grueling onboarding process or learn coding to use DogQ because it’s completely codeless and features articulate documentation, making it available for business owners, project managers, and everyone else who is not proficient in QA.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a difference between UI and UX testing?

While both constitute the scope of usability testing, there is a difference between UX and UI testing, which basically corresponds to the difference in the nature of the two concepts.

UI testing aims to check the design, the layout, and the responsiveness of buttons and icons. UX deals with assessing the navigation process of a user and looking for the most efficient way to facilitate their interaction.

What is the difference between UI and GUI testing types?

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a part of User Interface (UI) testing. Today, the names are used interchangeably because the biggest part of UI elements today is graphic. GUI testing includes checking graphical images, buttons, and all visual objects a user interacts with. UI testing is involved in assessing both graphical items and non-graphical ones, for example, text-based.

What does a usability testing report consist of?

A usability testing report needs to include a comprehensive but concise description of the key findings made upon a thorough analysis of test results. A QA engineer categorizes them according to their level of importance and, based on the insights received, includes recommendations on how to enhance the product for the team of developers. A sound automation testing tool can produce testing reports, assuaging a rather onerous task for QA.

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