UX and UI Testing: How to Make Them Work in Your Favor

This article was born out of an active discussion that sparked during one of our retrospective meetings. Our team was discussing the issues that our clients often bring up during calls: what is the most important type of testing today? Which testing activities require particular attention from human testers: functionality, security, or perhaps UI testing? In other words — which tests cannot be skipped and must be done by an attentive testing specialist?

Many experts focus on more or less similar tests, only adapting the definitions in accordance with the respective target audience. In this article, we won’t name all the testing types once again, but we’ll talk about the most important one — UI/UX testing.

Why does UX UI testing occupy an increasingly important place in the modern software development and testing landscape? How to make sure the product meets the needs of the users with UI/UX testing? And how to choose the right approach for comprehensive testing of usability and user interface? Find out all about it from our guide.

What Are the Main Requirements for a Good UI and UX?

There is a standard list of requirements that fit most of the apps and if they are met, chances are high that your app or website will have a good usability score. These requirements, in one way or another, are used by all professionals and vendors that provide usability testing services. 

Accessibility

The product should be accessible to the largest number of its potential users. People with disabilities should be able to use it via assistive services just as easily as an average target user. People with different backgrounds and native languages shouldn’t have issues using your app either.

Perceivability

All parts of the interface should be easy to perceive and have alternatives. For example, if an image is unavailable, it should have alternative text or a caption so users can understand what it represents. Another example is providing captions in video material and a transcript for audio.

Operability

This usability requirement concerns user activity and means that everything that is conceived should be possible to use, for example: 

• All the features should be available and working. 
• User needs to have enough time to read the interface and its content. 
• The content should be physically safe (e.g. it should not cause seizures in predisposed users). 

Ease of Navigation

On the same note, what makes an interface operable is good navigation, in any type of website or software, from the simplest to the more complicated ones. 

Navigation should be made as simple, easy, and seamless as possible so that users don’t think about doing something and just do it. 

High Performance

To gauge the performance of your site or app, you need to be aware of the speed at which it loads pages and content, especially high-quality images. Text loads faster than images and illustrations, so the aim here is to make sure your product is in no way sluggish and loads within a matter of seconds.

And in terms of design, you should think about what’s happening while the content is loading. For example, the spinning wheel was introduced to interfaces so users know that something is happening and the app didn’t just freeze.

Understandable Interface

In an understandable interface, the content is readable – there’s no fine print or clash of colors. It also operates in predictable ways so users can avoid making mistakes.

For example, if a user is filling out a form and missing a required field, a window will pop up alerting them to the problem.

Responsiveness

Since handheld devices are used more than computers and laptops these days, it’s important to keep up with the times and adapt content and web design for phone use as well. This poses a web design challenge because most sites are designed with computers in mind.

Responsiveness is all about your site working smoothly and cleanly regardless of the device it’s opened on. You can even do this adaptation on WordPress, but it still needs to be tweaked to look as presentable as it would on a large screen.

Learnability

Learnability is the ease and pace at which a user picks up the ways to use a product. It used to be very common for user interfaces to require training to operate them but the current trend is toward creating UI that is usable for every kind of user right away. This is why learnability is such an essential requirement; it makes sure that different kinds of users, including complete amateurs, can get on board easily.

Credibility

Credibility means that your product should inspire justified trust in users. This means people are trusting that: 

• The product will do what it is intended (or expected) to do; 
• It will do it in a safe and harmless way; 
• It will be of the expected quality and do it in the expected time. 

It’s simply impossible to ship out your product with a faulty UI and bad UX and expect customers to still be willing to adopt it. Users will just go elsewhere and find what they are looking for. 

User-Friendliness

This just means that the UI should be a pleasure to use. This could mean aesthetically pleasing designs, quick navigation and loading times, and any other features that users love to see on their interfaces. This is such a big requirement because many users base their opinions about products and interfaces on how user-friendly they are.

Absence of Errors

This means that it should be virtually impossible to give wrong results when information is fed into the app or website. It should be bulletproof against the entrance of invalid data or unexpected user scenarios. The harder you make it to make an error in the first place, the better the error tolerance of your product will be.

Smooth Flow

A good flow is a combination of actions that follow seamlessly, exactly as a user intuitively expects it to be. Some examples of bad flow are: 

• Unreasonably long processes with many steps and screens to pass; 
• Unnecessary or irrelevant pop-ups between commands; 
• Repeated steps or expected steps missed.

In terms of website usability, flow also means that one relevant page is followed by another relevant page without any additional information being thrown at the user.

Customization 

It deeply depends on each app or website; however, nowadays, we’re used to customized experiences and we expect a certain minimal level almost everywhere. This basic level includes the ability to manage such things as user names and avatars, color schemes, and timezones — it’s what we do in many apps, from email accounts to games. In more complicated apps, the expected level of customization may go deeper and include many more features corresponding to the product. 

User Engagement 

Visually stimulating content that is fun and interesting to look at guarantees user engagement. Certain apps boast much higher user engagement levels than others, and one huge reason for this is that they promote the kind of content that they know will garner the most user attention and engagement. This means that the majority of users should rate your app’s tools as fun to use.

What Is UI Testing?

User interface testing is a type of testing in which testers need to make sure that all buttons, fields, labels, and other items on the screen work as specified. UI testing involves checking screens with controls, such as toolbars, colors, fonts, sizes, buttons, icons, etc., and how they respond to the user input. Simply put, with the help of UI testing software, we see how an application, website, or software will interact with the end-user.

What Exactly Are We Looking for With UI Testing?

UI testing is a rather broad term that includes a variety of visual elements used in the interface of a software product. Essentially, User Interface testing checks how the product under testing performs for a real user based on the following criteria:

• Ease of use
• Consistency and logic
• Accessibility
• Compatibility

In order to achieve effective results during UI testing, the tester must answer at least two important questions:

1. Are all features of the tested software clear and easy to use?
2. Can a user navigate through the app without experiencing system errors or malfunctions?

There’s also a bonus question:

1. Will the interface guide users towards making the right decisions?

Usually, User Interface testing is applied to end products, but I suggest making it an integral part of testing throughout the entire product development process.

“Small changes made at any stage of the development can have a disproportionately big impact on the UI.”

So, it is important to configure the user interface in accordance with these changes and provide feedback that is received during the sessions with UI testing tools. This also should be reflected in the test cases written for all future UI tests.

It turns out that even a minor issue, such as the lack of a button or a typing error, can lead to a huge problem in the overall design. It goes without saying that it is much cheaper to fix UI bugs at the development stage. Unfortunately, bugs are sometimes missed, so companies have to deal with fixing them after the product is released, which is, unsurprisingly, very costly.

Why Is It So Important to Perform UI Testing?

The development team can spend a lot of time creating a product with powerful features, but if there are any problems with using the interface, that is all the users will remember.

In other words, if there is anything that makes it difficult for a user to work with your app, even the best and most unique functionality won’t save you from negative feedback. So, in order to provide the best user experience possible, never forget about UI testing types.

Manual vs. Automation Approaches to UI/UX Tests

One of the approaches to UI tests is manual software testing. This implies the presence of a human tester that will perform a set of operations manually to ensure that the app is working correctly and that the graphical screens meet all the requirements.

If you want to ensure the speed and quality of UI testing process, it is recommended to use automation UI UX testing tools that have been specially developed for this purpose:

• Watir

• Sahi

• Sikuli

• AutoIT

• TestComplete
• Testomato

Also, UI testing can be partially performed with the help of browser extensions, such as Visbug, What font, Web developer, Page Ruler, ColorZilla.

Checklist for UI Testing

As with any type of test cases, in order to ensure the smooth process of user interface examination, it is always better to have a UI testing checklist (which can be changed and adjusted to meet the product needs). But the basic parameters that are usually checked while performing UI software testing are as follows:

• Type and font size
• Colors
• Icon styles
• Visual inconsistencies
• Required fields
• Data type errors
• The width of the fields
• On-screen instructions
• Progress indicators
• Confirmation of action (save, change, delete)
• Drop-down lists
• Error messages
• Shortcuts

What is UX Testing?

In short, UX testing is a process of testing various aspects of the user experience to determine the best way for a project and its elements to interact with its audience. Why are UX tests so important? Let’s look at a real-world example:

Imagine that you own an online store, which is not that different from many other stores, and yet it offers something special — it has a unique design or some cool additional features, it is AI-enabled, or simply has a unique range of products. But here is where the problem starts: while working on your website, developers have made a mistake and as a result your navigation or buttons don’t work as intended.

This means only one thing — your users have no chance to experience the unique features of your store, which obviously results in customer loss and negative feedback for your company. Moreover, your product imperfection may affect your business even after the issues have been resolved. Reputation damage tends to stick around. This is why you need UX testing.

User Experience Checking Points

User experience testing deals with some of the most crucial components of a software application — the way real users interact with the product and whether the design of the application is able to increase the satisfaction and loyalty of the users. This is why UX testing always benefits from having a real human being performing QA. Here are the things you must pay attention to when performing UX tests:

• navigation through the website (or application) must be easy;
• the user must have access to information about the product;
• the order placement process must be effortless;
• the performance of the site (or app) must meet user requirements.

UX Testing: Manual vs. Automation

Often, UX testing is done with the help of automation tools that allow understanding the user behavior better as well as predict his expectations about software products. The most popular ones include:

• Automatic record of screen activities of the user sessions
• Heat maps
• User questionnaires to evaluate the product and understand what needs to be improved
• Analysis of the competitors’ products

UX testing can also be performed manually. As the main criteria of the UX tests are “best practice” and “common sense,” this type of testing should be carried out by specialists who have worked with similar products before. Relevant experience is required so the tester can understand the requirements for the UI elements – what is the right location of those elements, what color should they come in, or how should they change when the users interact with them.

When Do We Perform UX Testing?

The necessity and the frequency of the UX tests performed usually depend on the goals the company is pursuing. For example, if the company adds some new features to its product – UX testing is a must. It is also highly recommended to regularly analyze client feedback with the help of automated tools.

What Are the Best Tools to Ensure a Quality UX Testing Process?

While UI and UX design testing are two types of testing with the heaviest reliance on the human eye and touch, the right testing tools can make the testing process more all-encompassing and efficient, giving the team a clearer picture and producing more reliable results. Below is the list of UI/UX testing tools our team uses on a regular basis:

• GTmetrix – creates a final report for the pages and offers various recommendations to resolve the issues.
• Optimizely – allows defining the conditions under which the income grows, registration, downloads and content increases.
• Crazy Egg – a heat map service that helps to understand how visitors interact with the website.
• Zurb – helps to understand whether the users like your web design and what they remember after interacting with your site.
• BrowserShots – a web service that allows making screenshots of your site in different operating systems and browsers.
• UXPunk – often used to understand the best hierarchy of website content as well as the most important pages that should be visible on your site.

UX Testing Checklist

The checklist for testing UX of a software product should be created specifically for the product and only after careful exploration of its visual elements and the functionality they’re linked to. Still, there are certain things that are present in nearly every software product, which allows QA engineers to create universally applicable checklists that can be modified when needed. Here are some of the most important parameters you should check while performing UX tests:

• Navigation – throughout the site, as well as through the sub-modules, including several pages (for example, Blog)
• Header
• Footer
• Buttons and Calls to Action – sizes, colors, and clickability
• Links – colors, clickability, and redirects
• Carousels
• Content (formatting)
• Forms – size, content, friendliness, and understandability
• Messages (including error messages) – colors, understandability, and compliance
• Interactive elements
• Additional elements – such as Back to top button, Help, Calendly
• Mobile version – the way the page is displayed in landscape and portrait mode

Benefits of UI and UX Testing

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) testing definitely require a lot of time and effort to be done properly. However, even when you are looking to optimize your QA process, UI/UX testing should never be omitted because it brings many sizable benefits to the stakeholders. Here are some of them.

Higher Quality of Software

It’s that simple — a software product with a properly tested user interface and optimized user experience is miles ahead in terms of quality over its competitors without the same amount of testing. And the higher quality of software leads to a string of other positive outcomes for a new or established software product.

Better User Engagement

Investigating the way users interact with a software product and finding out whether they are happy with the product in the first place builds a solid foundation for higher user satisfaction. The more users like the product and the more frequently they engage with it, the more likely they are to turn into loyal customers.

Fewer Opportunities Lost

If you have ever struggled with placing an order in an online store and then quit anyway because the site was riddled with bugs, then you understand how much of a negative impact the lack of UI/UX testing can have on a product. In other words, thorough testing helps you make sure that users don’t abandon your product and that you don’t miss out on revenue.

Strong Competitive Advantage

In a time when there are lots of players even in the smallest niches and industries, a business should use every advantage it can get. In many cases, a good, well-tested UI and UX can become that one competitive advantage you are looking for, especially when your closest competitors don’t seem to bother with this type of testing. As ubiquitous as UX testing may seem, only 55% of companies do it, which means you can get ahead of the game.

Optimized Development Cycle

Timely UI/UX testing helps you optimize your development process and release products faster. For example, when UX testing in the early stages of product development shows that users don’t particularly enjoy a feature you’re planning to add, scraping those plans saves your development team some valuable time and allows you to release the product sooner.

UI Testing vs. UX Testing: What’s the Difference?

UX and UI testing are two terms that are so often used together that some people also begin to use them interchangeably. And while both of these testing types revolve around the human experience with the product, and a faulty UI will undoubtedly have a negative impact on the UX, there is a clear distinction between the two and they should not be confused.

UI refers to the things we see, while UX is all about the way we experience the product. A good example of that is web design that is rich in animated and interactive elements. Their presence adds value to the website’s UI and makes it more eye-catching than its competitors. However, the way real users feel about those elements may tell a different story, as animations can be distracting, overly flashy, or obscuring other website elements from view. And you can only find out about that by conducting extensive usability testing. Here are a few more crucial differences between the two types of testing:

• UI testing focuses on the correct layout and placement of design elements, while UX testing focuses on the connection between the design element and its impact on the user experience.
• UI testing can be performed as soon as the element has been designed and coded, while it’s only possible to do UX testing after the element has been linked to the specific functionality.
• UI testing can be successfully automated, and is generally pretty easy to automate, while UX testing heavily relies on the human eye and human interaction with software, which makes it challenging to automate.

How to Perform UI/UX Testing

The process of UI/UX testing encompasses a wide range of activities and requires a well-thought-out approach with a lot of planning. However, the whole process can be broken down into just three steps. Here is how to do UI/UX testing.

1. Identify the Areas You Want to Focus on

Both UI and UX design testing don’t always require the team to test the software product as a whole. A round of UI/UX testing can include just one or several elements that are crucial to the product’s success. The team needs to have a clear understanding of what they are about to test.

2. Plan and Conduct the Tests

Using checklists or other techniques to plan the testing process, the QA team needs to take their time to prepare for the actual testing. Then, when everything is ready, the team will run the tests, working according to plan and documenting the results.

3. Analyze the Findings and Make the Changes

The final stage of testing UX and UI in a software product is collecting the discoveries, evaluating their effect on the solution overall, and working together with the development team and other project stakeholders to eliminate the issues and further increase the quality and user appeal of the product.

Challenges of UI/UX Testing

As much as testing a website or app for usability is one of the crucial activities that define the audience reception and the subsequent success of a software product, this process is not without its challenges. While trying to eliminate UI and usability challenges, the testing team can encounter certain complications, and here are the most common ones.

Selecting the Areas for Testing

A modern software solution is a highly complex system with rich functionality, countless design elements, and endless ways for users to interact with it. This creates an additional challenge for the testing team, as it is hardly feasible to test every single possible interaction. The team’s job is to prioritize the test cases, finding the perfect balance between testing as many areas as possible while keeping the use of the resources reasonable.

Diversity of the User Base

Products created for the general audience, as opposed to software built for highly specific industry use, need to account for all the variabilities that come with a diverse user base. This includes different levels of technical proficiency, different devices used to access the software, different accessibility needs, and different habits when it comes to interacting with software. It means that the QA team must go beyond the standard UI/UX testing methods like basic accessibility testing and test from the user’s perspective, truly embodying various user personas and types.

Ensuring Management Buy-In

While most modern business owners won’t argue too hard with the necessity of software testing, they often want to do the bare acceptable minimum like functional testing and security testing, while UX and UI testing get put on the backburner. This is why the QA team must work closely with the project stakeholders and decision-makers to ensure a complete buy-in from the very beginning, keeping them informed all throughout the project and after its completion, so that they see what kind of an impact their efforts make on the usability of the product.

Racing Against the Clock

It’s safe to say that the market for any type of software is getting more competitive by the minute. Users don’t have to stick with a product riddled with usability issues, as new, alternative software is released regularly and quickly. This means that teams need to get equally quick with their testing efforts. It’s important to find a solution that allows you to test as many scenarios and cases as possible in as little time as possible. Automated testing is one of the most effective ways to speed up the testing process and catch up with the growing competition.

Automating UX and UI Testing

While automation testing seems like the perfect answer to all UI and UX testing-related challenges, the reality is that it can create some challenges of its own. Most importantly, usability testing is one of the most difficult types of testing to automate, as it heavily relies on the ways real humans interact with the software — something that even the most advanced testing tools are not yet ready to replicate completely. Plus, automation requires a significant investment of time and money to get the project going, so all stakeholders need to get a realistic idea of the automation ROI and manage their expectations accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Both UI and UX testing are relatively new but rapidly developing types of testing. In fact, to be able to perform these tests, extensive experience won’t cut it. You must also keep a close eye on design trends, learn how to use automation tools, and be able to carry out a detailed analysis of information constantly. UI and UX testing is not the cheapest service provided by the testing firm, and it is obvious that each business will choose services depending on its goals, capacities, and needs.

But it should be kept in mind that no matter what your project is or what features it includes, the main criterion for its evaluation (aka — success) is an attractive and convenient UI that ensures a truly great experience for your users. As one study points out, every $1 invested in a good UX has a return of $100, so it’s definitely worth your time and effort.