Technological evolution is inevitable in this highly pacing digital world; thus, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date with new technologies. To stay ahead of competitors, you must provide a seamless user experience with your web applications. And one of the essential factors to ensure a unique user experience is web app testing.
Web app testing includes a lot of factors, such as functionality, smoke, UI, regression testing, and more. But, browser testing ensures whether it provides a seamless user experience or not. Individuals can use any browser to access your web app, and if they don’t find it user-friendly, they’ll move to another resource. Thus, it’s crucial to test your web app across multiple browsers, operating systems, and devices.
What is Cross-browser Testing?
Cross browser testing is the ultimate process of testing a web app across multiple browsers to ensure it provides a smooth experience. In general, it is the responsibility of web developers to build a responsive site that matches the current requirements. However, cross-browser testing is performed at every stage of the development. Even if the site is updated with a new feature or functionality, it should be tested for cross-browser compatibility.
During cross-browser testing, you need to ensure multiple aspects of a web app, such as screen size, operating system version, screen resolution, and more. The main objective of browser testing is to remove any discrepancies in the website’s user interface and maintain its browser compatibility. You can perform browser testing both manually and using automation tools.
Manual cross-browser testing is time-consuming and lengthy, as it requires human intervention to create bug-free test scripts. On the other hand, automation testing offers smooth testing of web app functionalities while managing test cases and scripts effectively. In addition, both these techniques are used to test the client-side behavior of a web application.
Why is Cross-browser Testing Required?
Earlier, cross-browser testing was not given much preference by developers, but things have turned with the movement to the agile development process. Nowadays, individuals use different devices, like mobiles, desktops, tablets, and browsers like Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc. All these browsers have their own rendering engine, representing a site in different formats. That’s why it is crucial to perform cross-browser testing for web apps.
In simple words, cross-browser testing makes it easy for developers to understand the web app behavior across different platforms. Besides, it eliminates the process of creating different site versions for different browsers.
What Should be Covered in Cross-Browser Testing?
As mentioned above, there are many things that need to be tested in cross-browser testing. Of course, it entirely depends on your user requirements and how they access your web app. However, the most common aspects of a web app that need to be covered on cross-browser testing include:
- Basic functionality of the web application like links, menus, navigation, dialogues, etc.
- Website response across various devices based on user activities
- Overall speed and performance of the web app across browsers and devices
- Graphical user interface of the app to ensure every user get the same feel
But, how does it improve the user experience?
We will highlight the factors that define how cross-browser testing can improve user experience on your website.
Impact of Cross-browser Testing in Improving User Experience
Cross-browser testing adds value to web app UI in multiple ways. It enhances user experience in areas that they’re not even aware of.
- Device Compatibility
In this era, you cannot define the devices customers use to browse the internet or access your site. There are thousands of smartphones, operating systems, and browsers available in the market, and all of them behave differently with the different rendering engines. But, as a web app developer, your main goal is to provide a consistent experience to every user.
Cross-browser testing ensures that your web app is accessible across these platforms without affecting any feature or functionality. Simply put, cross-browser testing makes your site ready for different browsers on different platforms.
- Make Sites Convenient and Accessible
Accessibility and convenience are the two essential factors that define customer satisfaction. It even leads your site to a better ranking on search engines. Both these factors rely on the CSS Gradient and CSS Opacity that make the foundation of how design impacts users’ attention. It means that there is no point in developing a site with a horrible CSS Gradient and Opacity that varies in behavior for different browsers.
Although modern browsers maintain the CSS Opacity themselves, if the user is accessing your site on old browsers like IE, Opera, you should maintain it. By channelizing the CSS Gradient native functions, you can improve your site loading speed without compromising the graphics quality.
- Quick CTA Rendering
A website is designed to attract customers to your products, services, or features while keeping them engaged. Call-to-action buttons play a vital role in customer decision-making; if you don’t have attractive and intuitive CTA buttons, users might not make the purchase. Thus, it is crucial to ensure that CTAs meet all browsers’ end-to-end functional and visual testing requirements. CTAs testing can be automated easily with the LambdaTest Cross-browser testing tool.
- Easy Navigation throughout The Site
Navigation is one of the crucial parts of a website that defines how users navigate different pages and links. The navigation must be easy and presentable for a responsive site to make the customer journey easier. Therefore, Google considers site navigation as one of the rank deciding factors. Most users often need easy navigation while finding and purchasing a product or service, and any negligence in navigation can impact their decision. However, many web apps face inconsistent navigation due to browser compatibility, which can be resolved with cross-browser testing.
- Browser Login Forms Compatibility
A user needs to fill the login form on a site to register as a customer. If there are any discrepancies in the login form, like wrong or misleading fields, users might leave the site immediately. It is observed that browsers have their own way of displaying forms. For example, both Chrome and Firefox display user forms based on their rendering engine, slightly different from each other. Thus, cross-browser testing of login forms is essential.
- Compatibility with Website Template
Some websites are designed with online platforms with pre-configured templates, such as WordPress, Magento, etc. These sites don’t require any coding to create the templates. But, the problem with the pre-configured templates is that they’re not compatible across all browsers and require the developer’s intervention. Generally, developers cannot find any discrepancies in these templates, so they need to perform extensive cross-browser testing before representing the site to the users.
- Media Compatibility
It’s very common to use graphics, images, and other media formats on a site to keep users engaged. But, due to different rendering engine capabilities, web app images often break or don’t represent accurately. It can also happen due to incompatible plug-ins or the data processing rate of the browsers. Cross-browser testing ensures whether the media files are compatible across browsers or not.
- Synchronization with User-centered Design and Browser
Cross-browser testing is executed to ensure the web app provides a better user experience with the best UX design methods. However, many user-centered designs are incorporated in the site at a later stage as well to improve the UX. If these designs don’t support the default browsers on a user’s system, there is no point in ingraining new designs.
- Using Different Fonts
Typography is a critical feature of web design, but it is not supported by legacy browsers like IE, Opera, etc. So, if you use heavy or modern fonts on web pages, it can decrease site loading time while affecting your search engine ranking. With cross-browser testing, you can ensure whether the fonts are compatible across multiple browsers or not. And if they’re not, what you can do is make them compatible across different platforms.
Besides improving the user experience, cross browser testing also helps the sales team boost conversion rate. So, what’s the best way to perform web app cross-browser testing?
There are various ways to test the cross-browser compatibility of a site, but the ideal method is to use an automation tool. For instance, LambdaTest Cross-browser Testing can help you test your website in the easiest way possible. It provides all the resources required to test a web app browser compatibility with 3000+ integrated browsers.
Wrap Up
Enterprises are doing their best to provide a seamless user experience in the market. And cross-browser testing is an excellent way to ensure that their objectives are met while maintaining desired standards. Furthermore, cross-browser testing must be performed at every stage of the development, as it impacts user experience in multiple ways. This article highlights how cross-browser testing can improve user experience in numerous ways.
