The worst thing that can happen to your product is that loyal users suddenly aren’t able to use it in the same convenient way. Frustration and anxiety enter social media quickly and suddenly, and the pressure on customer support to respond meaningfully and in time increases with every minute. You can prevent this by being more strategic when rolling out new versions of our products. In this article, Vitaly Friedman will look into a strategy for product designers and front-end engineers to thoroughly test and deploy a feature before releasing it to the entire user base, and how to avoid UX issues from creeping up down the road.
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This is an experiment in a slightly different format for Smashing Magazine — using a storytelling approach to convey the same lessons learned that a traditional article would have provided. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will take you through the story of Noah, the “UX guy” for the corporate office of a regional fast food restaurant, that was in the process of creating a mobile app to allow patrons to customize their meals, place orders and earn rewards.
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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. The traditional approach to cross-browser testing doesn’t align well with these ideals. Either you make a half-hearted attempt at manual testing or you expend a lot of effort on doing it “properly”. Once you’ve put in the effort of knowing your enemy, you’re able to attack in three steps: reconnaissance, raid and clearance. In this article, Chris Ashton hopes to save you hours of wasted effort by describing a testing strategy which is not only less labour-intensive, but more effective at catching bugs.
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By focusing almost exclusively on the user insights that each test is designed to yield, prototype testing can be an impressively efficient method for product teams to run experiments. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it. In this article, Michelle Chu gives six tips for designers to consider when creating prototypes specifically to generate user testing insight.
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User-testing mobile apps and websites is an essential component of the UX toolkit. Running regular mobile usability tests is the only way to gauge how well this channel is working for your customers. A bit of hacking is required. And, after years of experimentation, Colman Walsh thinks he’s figured out the best hack available yet. If you want to test iPhone or Android experiences, this solution is simple, cost-effective and high quality. After your first time getting things together, setup takes about five minutes the second time, and you can have this solution in place for less than $200 if you’re using a MacBook. (By comparison, Morae, the high-end usability testing software, sells for $2,000.)
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Nicholas C. Zakas started looking for a way to automatically detect incorrect patterns. He couldn’t get the idea of a linter with pluggable runtime rules out of his head. He had just spent a bunch of time learning about Esprima and abstract syntax trees (ASTs), and he thought to himself, “It can’t be all that hard to create a pluggable JavaScript linter using an AST.” It was from those initial thoughts that ESLint was born. ESLint is a JavaScript linter that has learned from our collective past of JavaScript development. It is committed to not only being a great linter out of the box, but also to being the center of a great and growing ecosystem of plugins, shareable configs and parsers.
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Your app has become another victim of the latest trend, joining a whopping 41% of today’s apps that are abandoned after only a single use. The most impressive warship of the day, Vasa floundered and sank just one mile into its maiden voyage due to fundamental design issues. In this article, Greg Nudelman will explore how the lessons from the Vasa ship can help you keep your mobile project from sinking right out of the port. Before you begin, put your vision in place as a storyboard. Take the time to test it with potential customers and stakeholders — ensure that they are as enthusiastic about your idea as you are.
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Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough. As the number of mobile users grows, new apps pop up daily. To make yours a success, be strategic about how you design the “shop window” for your app — the app’s page. A/B testing and optimization of the icon, screenshots and video preview will give you a better chance of higher conversions, a higher volume of organic downloads and a better return on your investment in user acquisition.
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How does your website look on the Windows Phone platform? Approximately 3% of your mobile users will be using a Windows Phone, so you may need to make sure that your site renders properly. If you’re a developer without a Windows Phone device, you might have to get a little creative to ensure that your websites are being rendered properly. In this article Daniel Herken will point out a few different tools and techniques which can help test websites for Windows Phone even if you don’t have the real device handy or if you are not developing on Windows.
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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? Ivan Shubin decided to look at another interesting side of visual testing. For the last seven years, his main focus has been testing automation for a big enterprise project. Over time, Ivan became obsessed with the idea of applying automated testing using the TDD methodology to the look and feel of responsive websites. In this article, he’ll describe this experiment in detail and propose TDD as a methodology for front-end development. He will look at the new visual testing technique and examine how to get the most out of it.
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