What are Visual Bugs

What are Visual Bugs?

Visual bugs are issues in the graphical user interface (GUI) of web or mobile applications, like misaligned texts or buttons, overlapping images or texts, partially visible elements, and responsive layout problems that can significantly impact the user experience. While primarily visual, these bugs can sometimes affect the application’s functionality.

Examples of Visual Bugs

Imagine an e-commerce website that functions flawlessly on a desktop, allowing users to browse, add products to their cart, and complete their purchase without any issues. However, when users access the same website on a mobile device, they encounter a problem – the “Proceed to Checkout” button does not appear within the screen range. As a result, the user is unable to add products to their cart, potentially causing them to leave the website.

Reasons Behind Visual Bugs

Exploring the causes of visual bugs is key to maintaining high-quality user interfaces in web and application development. Here’s a closer look at each of these contributing factors:

• Dynamic Content: It is difficult to test for visual inconsistencies in websites and apps whose content changes dynamically based on user interactions. This task is particularly challenging if the testing tools are not designed to accommodate these variable elements.
• Responsive Design: With the variety of devices and screen sizes, ensuring UI consistency across all platforms is challenging
• Browser and Device Compatibility: Visual bugs can vary across different browsers, browser versions and devices, making consistent rendering a major challenge. 
• Complex UI Components: Modern applications feature complex UI components like overlays, modals, and interactive elements. Ensuring the visual integrity of these components and their interactions demands advanced testing methods.
• Localization and Internationalization: Visual bugs can occur when localizing an application for different languages or regions, as variations in text length and character sets can impact the layout and appearance of UI elements.
• Cross-Browser Rendering Differences: Web browsers can interpret styles and layouts differently, so visual testing must consider cross-browser rendering differences. Over 30% of testers feel that ensuring consistency in user interface across various screens and devices is a significant challenge.
• Limited Testing Environments: Testing environments, which might not precisely reflect the production environment, can lead to challenges in replicating visual bugs due to differences in server response times, data sets, or network conditions.

​​Visual Bug Tracking Process

Visual bug tracking is essential in effectively managing and resolving visual discrepancies, thereby maintaining the visual integrity and user experience of the application. Listed below are the steps involved in a visual bug tracking process.

• Identify Bug: Visual bug identification can be done through manual observation or automated visual testing tools like Percy. Key indicators of a visual bug include the application’s visual element misalignments, color inconsistencies, or layout issues that differ from the intended design.
• Report: Once identified, the bug is reported in a bug tracking system within the visual testing tool. The report should include detailed information such as the environment in which the bug was found (browser type, screen size, device), steps to reproduce the bug, and screenshots or videos for clarity.
• Fix: Developers then work on fixing the bug based on the report. This step may involve adjusting front-end code (CSS styles, HTML structures, or JavaScript interactions) to rectify the visual inconsistency. Ensuring the fix works across all platforms and devices is crucial.
• Review: After the fix is implemented, it goes through a review process. The focus is to ensure that the fix efficiently resolves the bug without introducing new issues.

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What is a Visual Testing Tool?

A visual testing tool, often referred to as an automated UI testing tool or visual regression testing tool, ensures the user interface of an application retains its visual integrity even after deploying new codes.  It’s essential to have a reliable tool to manage the testing process. How does Percy help in identifying visual bugs?

How Does Percy Help in Identifying Visual Bugs

Percy by BrowserStack stands out as a top choice for automating visual testing. The enhanced visual coverage provided by Percy enables teams to implement code changes with each commit confidently.

• Perform Cross Browser Testing: Percy provides cross-browser visual testing for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and more. It handles browser updates and maintenance, showing unique screenshots and visual differences for each browser directly in the build, with diffs indicated on the browser icon.
• Pixel by Pixel comparison: Percy conducts a pixel-by-pixel comparison between the current version of a webpage or application and a baseline image to detect visual bugs. This precise comparison method identifies even the smallest differences in layout, color, or design elements, flagging any discrepancies as potential visual bugs.
• Cross Platform Rendering: Percy specializes in rendering web pages across multiple browsers (like Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari, etc) in various platforms (desktop and mobile), identifying specific visual discrepancies. It captures and compares DOM snapshots and assets against previous versions, effectively detecting visual changes and ensuring consistent appearance across environments.
• Responsive Diffs: Percy renders pages at user-defined responsive widths, adjusting the browser size for screenshot generation and emphasizing visual differences. It organizes visual changes and filters out irrelevant noise, enabling quicker and more precise visual reviews.
• Snapshot Stabilization: Percy utilizes its unique snapshot stabilization technology to automatically halt animations and dynamic elements, significantly reducing false positives. This ensures that pages are rendered consistently and deterministically across tests.
• Parallelization Capabilities: Percy is adaptable to various test environments, including parallelized setups, and can be tailored for custom configurations. It consolidates snapshots from different processes or machines into a single Percy build for streamlined management.
• I​​ncreased Productivity and Scalability: Automated visual testing excels in precision, speed, and cost-effectiveness. Its scalable and economical approach is advantageous for developers, designers, product managers, and marketers alike, streamlining design verification, information sharing, and UI updates for various team roles.
• Getting Complete Code Refactoring Confidence: Coding stress often arises from uncertainty about causing errors or not fully understanding design implementations. This leads to time-consuming manual searches for visual bugs and writing tests to prevent regressions. Visual Testing automates this, allowing for confident deployments with assurance that the app looks perfect across different browsers and screen sizes. 

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How to detect Visual Bug with BrowserStack Percy?

Here is a quick rundown of how to identify visual bugs on Percy. Refer to this documentation to learn more about this. 

• Login to Percy.
• Create a project.
• Set environment variables
• Integrate the Percy SDK into your web application. It supports various programming languages and testing frameworks, so you can choose the one that suits your project. Refer to this guide to learn more. 
• Generate first build
• Generate second build
• You see the comparison between the first and the second builds.

Talk to an Expert

Visual bugs, while often overlooked, can significantly impact the user experience and overall quality of web and application interfaces. An automated visual testing tool like BrowserStack’s Percy is instrumental in detecting and addressing these issues efficiently. 

Canva, uses BrowserStack to perform visual testing. By automating the process of identifying discrepancies in the user interface, Percy not only saves time and resources but also enhances accuracy in bug detection.

Take the first step towards impeccable user interfaces with Percy’s automated visual testing. Don’t let visual bugs compromise your user experience. Explore how Percy can streamline your testing process and enhance your product quality. 

Start your journey to a bug-free UI now!

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Best Practices to detect Visual Bugs

Here are some best practices to detect visual bugs in one-liner pointers:

1. Cross-Browser Visual Testing: Test across multiple browsers to catch rendering discrepancies. BrowserStack Percy allows you to test on different real browsers and devices.
2. Automated Visual Testing Tools: Use tools like Percy or Applitools to detect pixel differences and UI distortions.
3. Manual Visual Inspection: Perform regular manual checks across devices and screen sizes for subtle design issues.
4. Responsive Design Testing: Ensure UI adapts correctly across different screen sizes and resolutions. BrowserStack Percy allows you to test on Mobile devices for responsiveness.
5. Color Contrast and Accessibility Checks: Verify that color contrast and font choices meet accessibility standards.
6. Consistency with Design Mockups: Compare the UI with design mockups to ensure pixel-perfect implementation.
7. Viewport and Image Scaling Checks: Test for image resolution and scaling issues on various devices and viewports.
8. User Interaction Testing: Check dynamic UI elements (such as, hover states, modals) for visual correctness during interactions.
9. Monitor Layout Shifts with CLS: Keep track of Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) to avoid unstable page layouts.
10. Use Pixel-Perfect Design: Maintain precise margins, padding, and alignment for consistent layouts across browsers.