The appearance of your website is a reflection of your company. A visually distorted design due to a visual bug gives the impression that a company doesn't pay attention to detail.
"If the website design isn't perfect, what does that say about the offerings?"
A site can be functional, but if it isn't aesthetically perfect, it will be abandoned by users in favor of its many competitors.
In this article, we explore the role of graphical testing in ensuring the aesthetic accuracy of your website at all times, and our tips for ensuring the UX of your website or application.
What is graphical testing?
Graphical testing verifies that the user interface (UI) is presented correctly to all users on the wide variety of devices and browsers potentially used to access the website, in order to optimize the user experience (UX).
They ensure that colors, fonts and other visual components of a website or application have the right shape, size and position by detecting discrepancies between what users should see and what is displayed on the screen.
Basically, visual testing helps to ensure that the site complies with visual standards on all devices and browsers.
Why are graphics tests important?
Attractive, intuitive designs are essential for user engagement.
It would be a shame to invest in a beautiful website or application, only to see it fail to display properly to your potential customers due to graphical bugs.
What's more, with the multiplication of operating systems, web browsers and devices, it's becoming increasingly complex to ensure that the UI displays correctly on each of the different combinations.
Graphical testing enables you to ensure that the user interface (UI) meets aesthetic requirements by identifying visual bugs that can affect the user experience and lead to frustration.
A visually perfect and intuitive UX also has an impact on SEO by reducing the bounce rate potentially linked to visual errors.
Another important benefit of graphical testing is that it ensures that an application or website complies with accessibility requirements such as WCAG, which focus on providing an intuitive, easy-to-navigate UX.
When should you run graphical tests?
Graphic testing is particularly important after a UX modification or update, to check that no changes have disrupted the design or ergonomics of your platform.
That said, it's best to run graphical tests early in the development process to improve overall UX quality.
How can you guarantee your website's UX from a graphic point of view?
Define your goals
Before you start testing, clarify your specific objectives.
What aspects of UX do you want to evaluate? What are your expectations in terms of visual appeal?
Creating a test plan will help you reduce the time and effort wasted in testing, and ensure that every visual aspect to be tested is actually tested.
Choose an automated graphical test tool to run your graphical tests
Contrary to its unambiguous name, visual tests are not ideally executed visually.
Although it is possible to manually scan each page to identify visual defects, this method is slow, complicated to implement for an entire application or website, and prone to human error.
Manual visual tests are limited to obvious errors in visible images, colors and text.
To detect crucial graphic bugs, testers need to inspect color code, fonts and images in CSS and HTML files for subtle visual flaws related to pixel variations, color deviations or layout shifts on different devices and browsers.
With an automated testing tool, they don't need to spend time checking these details every time new changes are made to the visual elements of the website.
Automated testing tools quickly detect these nuances, enabling testers to identify and resolve potential problems before they affect the user experience.
Automated graphical testing also reduces costs by saving potentially lost customers due to a visually flawed UX, as well as speeding up the testing and debugging process.
Automation enables continuous, reliable testing throughout the development cycle, ensuring that visual regressions are identified and resolved quickly, reducing the risk of defects reaching production.
Avoid duplication of scenarios with automation
At Mr Suricatewe carry out automated graphical tests using our no-code graphical testing tool to avoid duplication of scenarios.
In this context, the multiplication of test scenarios leads to increased complexity and the maintenance costs associated with managing a large number of test scenarios.
This could also lead to difficulties in keeping up with all the scenarios, longer execution times and potentially higher resource consumption.
In addition, it could become difficult to guarantee complete coverage of all relevant test cases, which could lead to gaps in testing and a reduction in overall test efficiency.
A/B test
Just because something is visually consistent with the desired result doesn't mean that the desired result is the most impactful.
In other words, there's always room for improvement, and nothing beats live results from users to assess just how visually impactful your UX is.
An A/B testing tool can perform experimental tests to understand which aspects of the UX increase the conversion rate.
For example, a slight modification such as a button in a different color can make all the difference!
Don't forget performance
The key is to have a balanced testing strategy that covers all the essential aspects.
Ultimately, it's the site's performance that will show off all your visual optimizations.
Web performance testing enables you to evaluate the stability and responsiveness of your site or application, to ensure fast loading, avoid crashes and maintain an optimal user experience.
Mr Suricate - simplified graphical non-regression testing thanks to no-code automation
Checking the visual aspects of your user experience is crucial to protect your brand.
A no-code test automation platform such as Mr Suricate makes these checks easy, so you can ensure visually perfect user journeys in the most efficient way possible.
Automate all your tests on a single SaaS solution
Simple & No-Code: Automate your tests without programming. Easy to use for non-technical profiles.
Multi-device: Run your tests in sequence on real devices (Desktop, Mobile App and API).
No integration: no code to install. Accelerated time to market.
Complete solution: Our R&D has come up with an answer to every problem encountered by our customers, making it the all-round solution.
