With the evolving digital landscape, delivering a visually flawless application is no longer optional, but a necessity for creating a pleasant user experience and maintaining the brand’s credibility. Various software development organisations are deploying code so frequently that keeping a record of UI changes becomes so difficult. Even small visual inconsistencies, like any mismatched elements or differences in layout, can impact users negatively and create a negative impression on brand perception and application usability.
Fortunately, visual testing or UI testing not only checks functionality but also the visual requirements in software application user interfaces. This assists in attaining an error-free interface that satisfies the high user expectations. Using proper visual testing tools guarantees that a website’s or application’s visual features, such as layout, graphics, buttons, and functionality, execute properly and as expected across platforms.
In this article, we will explore the top visual testing tools that can help organisations deliver consistent, pixel-perfect designs, ensuring software with smooth visuals. But before that, let’s first understand what visual testing is and what the benefits of using these tools are. So, let’s start.
Understanding Visual Testing
Visual testing refers to the process of verifying an application’s visual elements or user interface (UI) designs by comparing the visible output with the outcomes anticipated by design. It assists in identifying visual flaws, which affect the appearance of a page or screen. In other words, it evaluates misaligned elements, unexpected colour shifts, design, font changes, theme, broken layouts, and ensures that each element of the web page looks good and works as expected across all platforms.
While it shares some similarities with UI testing, visual testing differs by apparently examining multiple areas like screen sizes, operating systems, and other factors. Visual testing tools are specialised testing solutions designed to detect visual differences in user interfaces.
Compared to standard testing, which pays more attention to functional requirements, these tools capture baseline images of the UI before any code changes, and then perform pixel-level comparisons of these snapshots to identify visual deviations. During the development cycle, the method helps the teams identify unexpected visual changes early on. Consequently, it aids in maintaining a uniform and intuitive user experience across screens, devices, and browsers, particularly in modern apps that undergo frequent user interface modifications.
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Importance of Visual Testing
With the advancement of web applications, there have been various factors that have necessitated visual consistency among various browsers, devices, and screen resolutions. That is the primary reason why visual testing is the most popular QA approach in the modern world.
Identifying visual effect bugs: The inappropriate arrangement of the buttons, contrast, or overlapping can influence the user experience. Visual testing is performed to test the functionality of the entire visual elements, including fonts, colours, images, and layout, and to identify visual errors. Furthermore, it improves user happiness, leading to improved user engagement and brand loyalty.
Validating user experience: A visually consistent and error-free interface improves user engagement. Visual testing identifies bugs and fixes them on time, which assures the brand reputation, design principles, and colour consistency.
Enhancing User Experience: The visual bugs may interfere with the user experience, causing frustration and even driving away users. Visual testing guarantees the smooth working of interactive elements, and navigation is simple to comprehend. This will provide the user with an intuitive experience, build trust, and make the application more presentable.
Growth in platforms and devices: Wearable devices, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, and Desktops are all expected to see a rise in the use of applications. Visual testing provides consistency, enhanced performance, and user satisfaction by detecting and fixing errors early on.
Maintaining Consistency: It is necessary that the user interface (UI) is innovative and consistent on all platforms to provide a perfect user experience, quality, and brand reliability. Automated visual testing assists in identifying the UI issues, such as layout issues, broken images, and text overlap, that can have an impact on the user experience.
Top Visual Testing Tools
Let’s deep dive into the best tools for visual testing.
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is an AI testing tool that allows testers to perform both manual and automated testing of web and mobile applications at scale. It also provides visual regression testing with AI capabilities, enabling testers to do pixel-by-pixel comparisons between web pages on various browsers and devices.
By leveraging the advanced image comparison techniques team can identify visual discrepancies across a cloud of more than 3000 environments and real mobile devices at scale, ensuring a consistent UI behaviour across different environments. The platform provides various test management tools in software testing, helping teams capture test requirements, design test cases, generate test execution reports, and manage resources.
Key features
- Supports taking full-page screenshots on various browsers and operating systems to compare them side by side. This allows visual deviations to be detected and UI to retain its integrity.
- The team can undertake responsive web design tests on various screen resolutions and devices and ensure that the UI scales smoothly across all platforms.
- Offers smartUI feature with annotation tools, allowing testers to directly mark specific areas of interest or concern on the UI. This streamlines the identification and communication of visual issues.
- The platform’s seamless CI/CD integration allows for automatic visual testing as part of the development workflow. This aids in detecting UI regressions early in the deployment process, ensuring complete test coverage and faster release cycles.
- The platform facilitates automated interactive testing of web applications across real browsers and devices in real time, allowing testers to quickly identify and address visual discrepancies.
Galen Framework
Galen Framework is an open-source visual automation testing solution that focuses on layout and responsive design verification of web applications. This tool is great for mobile and desktop interface usability since it allows responsive web design testing through its browser resizing feature to validate consistent visual presentation across different devices.
Key Features
- Uses human-readable Galen Specs language for writing specifications, enabling the definition of element positioning and alignment for a set of screen sizes.
- Supports cross-browser testing using Selenium.
- Galen Framework generates detailed HTML reports where testers can see all their test objects on the page, simplifying the process of issue identification.
- Enables image comparison and colour scheme verification.
- Automatically highlights the misaligned elements through image comparison and colour scheme verification, making it easy to see mismatching areas and check what is wrong on the Page.
Needle
Needle is a visual regression testing software that is open source and lightweight. It does a layout comparison between various versions of applications based on saved images. The tool is compatible with varying dimensions of the viewport, and it has a simple interface that enables visual testing to be accessible to the novice.
Testers can also use Needle to take baseline images, which they can compare against new screenshots obtained during testing sessions. This enables them to detect visual modifications during early development stages so they can discover regressions before they reach the production environment.
Key Features
- Baseline image comparison to find visual regressions.
- It is perfect for tracking visual consistency between staging and production environments.
- The tool functions with many different viewport sizes.
- It saves images on local storage for convenient file maintenance and organisation.
- Beginner-friendly user interface for quick installation setup.
Key features that make a great visual testing tool
When choosing the appropriate visual testing tool, it is crucial to guarantee a smooth and consistent user interface across different platforms. When evaluating the ideal tool, consider the features and capabilities that match the current development process. A strong tool will provide robust integration options, address the specific testing needs, and combine performance, accuracy, collaboration, and flexibility, all without introducing unnecessary complexity into the workflows. Key factors to consider are-
- Cross-browser compatibility: Testers should ensure that the application is consistent across platforms by being compatible with many browsers and devices.
- CI/CD integration: To maximise efficiency, opt for a solution offering a smooth integration with CI/CD pipelines as well as existing testing frameworks.
- Automation capability: Give preference to tools that provide automated visual regression testing and AI-based detection. This will minimise false positives and replicate human judgment for effective UI change detection.
- Scalability: As the application’s complexity increases, the chosen option must be able to manage growing project demands.
- Reporting feature: Evaluate tools that provide detailed and actionable reports, including visual diffs and issue tracking.
- Better team collaboration: Consider tools that promote team collaboration, such as annotation tools and shared reports.
- Cost effectiveness: Evaluate the pricing against the features provided to fit the testing budget without compromising quality.
- No-code authoring: Ensure that the tool empowers QA teams to contribute without programming
Conclusion
In conclusion, nowadays, ensuring seamless user experiences and brand-first digital design is no longer an option layer of quality assurance but a must. Visual bugs are the first issues that users notice and the last that teams detect. Performing visual testing allows testers to catch subtle layout bugs and maintain UI integrity across multiple platforms, helping them ensure their applications have a smooth and visually appealing interface.
Each tool mentioned above offers specialised features to meet a specific testing requirement. They help enhance application quality standards, shorten testing periods, and reduce maintenance requirements for teams. Choosing one may depend upon the needs and budget, as well as what the test team wants to accomplish with it.
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