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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A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the method of pitting two versions of a landing page against each other in a battle of conversion. You test to see which version does a better job of leading visitors to one of your goals, like signing up or subscribing to a newsletter. You can test two entirely different designs for a landing page or you can test small tweaks, like changes to a few words in your copy.
Running A/B tests on your website can help you improve your communication with visitors and back up important design decisions with real data from real users. With the multitude of tools available (detailed later), split testing has become easy for even non-technical people to design and manage.
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With all of the different smartphones, tablets and other devices that sport various operating systems and versions thereof, a Web developer’s job — testing (sometimes virtually) on multiple devices to resolve errors — hasn’t become any simpler. This article suggests how we can manage these tasks without pouring a truck-load of money into actually buying all of these different devices.
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Testers are often thought of as people who find bugs, but have you ever considered how testers actually approach testing? Do you ever wonder what testers actually do, and how they can add value to a typical technology project? I’d like to take you through the thought process of testers and discuss the types of things they consider when testing a mobile app.
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Managing a personal device lab can be quite hard with an ever expanding number of devices. It’s not only expensive, but also bad for our environment. Think of a situation where every web developer would purchase a large pile of gadgets and keep adding new ones as they are launched — this wouldn’t make much sense. Thankfully, there are better ways to handle the problem.
During the spring of 2012, Jeremy Keith wrote on his website that anybody is welcome to visit their device lab at Clearleft’s office in Brighton, UK and use their devices. What they didn’t expect, though, was that in response many local developers offered to add their own devices to the collection as well. Two weeks later Jeremy Keith and Remy Sharp also presented this idea at the Mobilism conference in Amsterdam and the people attending loved it. A few months after Mobilism, similar labs started popping up in places like Amsterdam, Berlin, London and Malmö.
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You probably know that testing is good, but the first hurdle to overcome when trying to write unit tests for client-side code is the lack of any actual units; JavaScript code is written for each page of a website or each module of an application and is closely intermixed with back-end logic and related HTML. In the worst case, the code is completely mixed with HTML, as inline events handlers.
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In a perfect world, cross-browser testing would be straightforward. We would download a legacy version of a browser, run it, and be able to instantly test our pages and scripts without a single care in the world. The reality of cross-browser testing, though, is very different.
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At some point in the future, the way that all major browsers render Web code will likely be standardized, which will make testing across multiple browsers no longer necessary as long as the website is coded according to Web standards. But because that day is still a way off (if it will really come at all), testing your design the advanced browsers as well as legacy browsers is a necessary part of any project.
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In a previous article on Smashing Magazine, I described A/B testing and various resources related to it. I have also covered the basics of multivariate testing in the past, yet in this post I’ll go deeper in the technical details of multivariate testing which is similar to A/B testing but with crucial differences.
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The attention span on the Web has been decreasing ever since Google had arrived and changed the rules of the game. Now with millions of results available on any topic imaginable, the window to grab a visitor’s attention has decreased significantly (in 2002, the BBC reported it is about 9 seconds). Picture yourself browsing the Web: do you go out of your way to read the text, look at all the graphics, and try to thoroughly understand what the page is about? The answer is most likely to be a straight “no.” With bombardment of information from all around, we have become spoiled kids, not paying enough attention to what a Web page wants to tell us.
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