Testing is crucial to ensuring success in the highly competitive landscape of mobile apps and games. But even poorly planned testing can take up 20 to 50% of your total development effort, in which case it would also account for the single biggest cost in your budget. To ensure that testing is extremely efficient, covering the breadth of today’s mobile ecosystems and device models, the best option is an online cloud-based service.
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So, your designers and developers have created a fantastic front-end design, which the client is delighted with, and your job now is to test it. Your heart begins to sink: Think of all the browsers, all the devices and all of these web pages you’ve got to test, not to mention the iterations and bug fixes. You need a front-end testing plan.
This article shows you what to consider when creating a front-end testing plan and how to test efficiently accross browsers, devices and web pages.
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We are increasingly using responsive design, responsive design with server-side components (RESS), adaptive design and combinations thereof to provide great high-performance multiscreen experiences. However, analytics implementations often miss information that is important to understanding how a website is being used on different devices.
For example, a website that varies the navigation layout based on screen size or user preferences might provide different user flows through the website depending on the layout being used. By enhancing Google Analytics, you’ll be able to identify and optimize under-performing layouts and screen sizes to improve performance on any device.
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When designing mobile first, navigation takes a back seat to content, and ruthless editing paves the way for more focused experiences. The pursuit of simplicity, combined with the tight spatial constraints of mobile viewports, often leads us to strip away elements in an attempt to minimize the interface. But the space-saving convenience we gain through clever editing and a compact UI can come at the expense of the very navigational aids our users rely on.
To help balance the craving for visual simplicity with the need to keep websites easy to navigate, we we can borrow some concepts from the world of wayfinding. This article shows how you can apply these concepts to the mobile web.
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In today’s fast-paced mobile market, consumers have no patience for mobile apps that compromise their experience. “Crashes” and “Not working” are the most common feedback on Google Play for unstable or sluggish apps (including games). lousy apps.
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People use their mobile devices everywhere: on the train, while waiting in line, sitting on the couch. As much as we aim to design our mobile apps and websites for contextual use, testing their usability in context can be challenging.
While getting out in the field for user testing is not always realistic, simulating much of that contextual experience in a lab is possible. One approach to mobile testing is participatory design.
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“Know your audience” has stood as a fundamental marketing principle since long before the web. When advertising online, you need to take into account one of the most basic factors of the audience you are reaching: what devices they are using.
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My Android Galaxy smartphone is so sweet. It plays games, has a lovely screen and lets me check all of my favorite websites while I’m commuting to and from work. And my new iPad is even better; it’s all I use at home when I’m relaxing in the living room, cooking in the kitchen or toileting on the toilet. As a consumer of electronic gadgets, I’m happier than Angelina Jolie in an orphanage with all of the devices with which I can use to access the Internet.
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There are many strategies to choose from when developing a modern, device independent website nowadays. How should capabilities of the device or browser be determined? Should the presentation logic be server side or client side? Traditionally, mobile optimization had to happen server side.
Over the last couple of years, Responsive Web Design and tools like Modernizr have become very popular. Recently, combination techniques (often called RESS), where optimization is done both server-side and client-side, has become a trend. The recently launched WURFL.js tool, fits into this category.
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A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.
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