Mobile App Testing

This is one way to ensure your app is easy to use and intuitive…

… but you should probably make sure your tester is de-clawed first.

A reminder for all of you usability testers out there: less is more. That’s the short version. Here’s the longer version courtesy of ZDnet.com:

Lately I’ve noticed some developers are getting away from this focused approach. Apps I have used for a long time are gradually getting buggier and bulkier, as one feature after another are added by the developers. The extra features don’t usually make the app better at performing the primary function, instead they add new capability just in case the user might find it beneficial.

Unfortunately, this rarely works for most users, especially the installed user base. It is jolting to update an app that one has used for a while, only to find that now the task it has always been used to perform is buried under new features and options. The user has to stop for a moment to see what the new stuff cluttering the screen may be. This is a failed effort if this prevents using the app for the original purpose, as it has turned the user experience from rock-solid to “now where did that go”.

I do a lot of private beta testing for new apps, and recently I’ve run across this developer attitude with a couple of them. One app was designed to do a specific function, but do it very well. The developer had done his homework, and the early versions of this app were really good. Then, over time the urge to add functions set in, and every new version of the app got worse at performing the primary task. Feature after feature kept getting added, just in case they added perceived value, and with that the app got harder to use and in some cases failed to perform the primary function.

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The first rule of usability testing is “Know Thy User.” This is true regardless of what type of application you are testing, whether it be a CRM platform, an online retail site and especially mobile applications. We present this image from TechCrunch to help all you mobile app testers out there better understand your users.

Here’s the second part of Jigar Patel’s post on mobile web app testing.

Safari and Mozilla Firefox support some great extensions that can make testing your mobile sites on desktop browser much easier. You can get more details here.

Testing mobile applications on the desktop browser, as mentioned, does provide several major advantages. Let me illustrate: From the browser metrics of the application, prepare a list of user agent strings for each browser in your metrics. User agent strings can be easily found through a Google search. From there, setup the Firefox browser to test with mobile application as mentioned in this article. Then, set the user agent sting in Firefox for each device, one by one, and navigate to the sign-in page of the application. See if the site renders the mobile version of the application or the PC version if available. If it does, then we are on the right path, and there is a good chance that real handset seating on the end user hand will redirect to the correct mobile version of the site.

If it renders the PC version of the site, this could be a bug in your application. If so, there are less chances for handsets being supported by your application, provided that it doesn’t render the mobile version of your site. Be sure to document each browser on which this behavior occurs and ask dev to fix it. If it can’t be fixed, then there is less of a chance that the real handset will support it. At this point, we can make the decision to cut down the devices/browser from the metrics which doesn’t redirect to the mobile version of the site. Now you can understand the advantage of testing on a desktop browser, that we can kick out the devices from this analysis before purchasing it to test and hence it will help to reduce the cost!

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