Did you know that 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience? People simply don’t have the patience to navigate janky interfaces, buggy interactions, or slow-loading websites. It is crucial to invest in user experience and customer happiness—it can make or break your company.
The best way to ensure a good user experience is by testing your product comprehensively, and one way to do that is with BrowserStack Live Testing. Teams need to use products the same way a user does, on the same devices, browsers, and even operating systems. This isn’t exclusive to just development teams or QA teams—every customer-facing team needs to test like a user.
QA teams must perform rigorous manual testing
Each build needs to be tested manually to ensure that no edge cases are missed and no bugs go uncovered. The only way to do this is via exploratory testing, as automated testing can never go off-script and discover such bugs. QA teams must also ensure that the navigation of critical paths go as expected and functionality isn’t affected. Any critical defects, if present, must be uncovered early by performing smoke testing.
Manual testing across browsers, devices, and operating systems will provide key insight into why test cases fail and how best to investigate a scenario.
Dev teams must reproduce bugs easily and perform QA
Developers need to be able to reproduce bugs easily to fix them efficiently—and it’s only possible to replicate bugs through manual testing on the reported browser, device, and operating system for maximum accuracy. Any bug fixes or new patches must also be retested manually before they are shipped to the staging or production environment.
Development teams must also encourage developers to perform QA on all their features by testing across browsers, and devices to ensure high quality output at speed.
Marketing teams should test design/copy changes
Take, for example, a marketing team releasing a new design or tweaking some copy. Does this change impact the website in any way? Will this unwittingly rearrange components of the website across certain devices? There’s no way to know—unless the team tests it out themselves.
Marketing teams need to ensure that every copy change, design update, and campaign looks as good on every phone as it is supposed to, and ensure that the brand is represented accurately. Marketers need to make sure every part of the website is delivering the right message to consumers—and that it is consistent across platforms. The only way to ensure this is with comprehensive testing across browsers, devices, and operating systems.
Support teams should reproduce user issues easily
When a user raises a support ticket, the customer support executive should reproduce the bug on the user’s browser, device, and operating system. This will help them understand the issue and communicate the problem to the resolution team.
Reproducing issues on the user’s browser, device, and operating system will allow support teams to identify and investigate issues that may have slipped through QA or automated testing, and get them resolved before other users encounter them.
Design teams need to check design execution
Every design change deployed needs to be checked on popular user environments to ensure that the different browser/device specifications don’t cause unintentional bugs. Teams need to check if everything is displayed as intended or if anything is unintentionally rearranged or hidden.
Testing across browsers, devices, and operating systems will give design teams visual confidence, allowing them to deploy changes fast.
Product managers must perform sanity testing
For product managers to truly stay close to the product, they need to use the product like a user—and spot potential issues across functional disciplines before a user does. They must test every newly implemented feature and check that it doesn’t impact usability.
By testing across browsers, devices, and operating systems, product managers can perform thorough sanity testing to be sure of the quality of every feature of the product.
Every team must check for real-world functionality
Things like look-and-feel and ease-of-use can only be understood by a human being. Teams must check every idea, prototype, copy change, design change, or process update as a real human being, trying out things like hand gestures (zooming in/out, tapping, etc.), interactions, and usability.
Every team should also test for localization
Localizing websites based on geographies and languages will help you appeal to different audiences, enter new markets, increase brand reach, and enhance customer experience. Teams need to check that visual elements, layouts, CTAs, copy, forms, etc. remain as close to the original language as possible—across different browsers and devices.
One tool to test them all - BrowserStack Live Testing
BrowserStack Live Testing is a cloud-based tool that lets you test anything across any browser/device/operating system at any time.
Teams across the company can use BrowserStack Live Testing to check things like 301 redirects, tracking, IP address exclusions, bugs overlooked by the QA teams, major website redesigns, new landing pages, and tweaks to copy or design. You can check the impact of these changes across the browser and device of your choice and evaluate if these changes will increase conversions or reduce bounce rates.
Using a team-wide solution will boost cross-functional communication, enable collaboration, and ensure faster resolution of issues, ultimately leading to increased customer happiness.
