Exponential growth in smartphone, tablet, laptop, and computer usage has made the web and app development industry competitive in recent years. As a result, easy-to-use, affordable, stable, and visually appealing software development has increased, but it can be successful only after rigorous software testing for customer satisfaction and demands. Thus, User Interface Testing is essential while developing web and mobile software applications. The article is a complete guide with checklists and examples for user interface testing.

What is user interface testing?

User Interface testing, also known as UI testing or GUI testing, tests the application's visual elements to validate proper functionality and expected performance. It ensures that user interface functions and applications components have no defects, such as icons, radio buttons, text boxes, toolbars, color, fonts, checkboxes, windows, and menus. The primary aspects of mobile user interface testing are functionality, performance, usability, compliance, and visual design of the software application to make sure the application works successfully and satisfactorily.

Why is UI testing important?

UI testing checks how the application handles user actions using input devices like keyboard and mouse and whether the visual elements are working and displayed correctly. In addition, when organizations perform iOS UI testing or Android UI testing, mobile user interface testing ensures the efficient and accurate performance of the software application's UI so that end-users adopt it quickly and successfully.

Poor iOS UI testing or Android UI testing produces faulty UI. A faulty UI does not meet user expectations. It is the only way to interact with users, and malfunctioning UI may damage the brand or product adoption. Therefore, it is vital for organizations developing software applications to carry out UI testing before releasing it to production.‍

Read: The Beneficial Results of Negative Testing

Types of UI tests

Mobile UI testing has different types based on various functional and non-functional testing strategies meeting specific standards of user interface testing. Some examples of software testing methodologies of iOS UI testing or Android UI testing are:

• Regression testing
• Functional testing
• Acceptance testing
• Unit testing
• Performance testing
• GUI testing

The GUI testing has different approaches:
• Manual testing:
It creates graphical models describing systems' behavior. It generates highly efficient test cases to understand the system performance in detail. The model-based testing follows steps discussed below:

• Model building for the system
• System input determination
• Verification of the expected output
• Test execution
• Checking and validating system output vs. the expected output.

How does testing user interfaces work?

iOS UI testing or Android UI testing generally focuses on the functionality and performance of the application's graphical user interface. First, commonly occurring UI defects should be tested and improved, such as button alignment issues, incomplete fields, resizing issues, overlapping of fields, browsing issues, inconsistent space between textboxes or labels, misaligned data pages, and so forth. Then a more profound performance and visual experience of the user interface is checked to ensure the expected performance of the application.

Benefits of UI Testing

Other than ensuring accurate working of the application's UI, mobile UI testing offers various benefits, as discussed below:

• Cost reduction: Automated iOS UI testing or Android UI testing is inexpensive compared to manual testing.
• Opportunity cost reduction: Automated mobile UI testing removes human errors and makes performance potentially more valuable and creative than manual testing.
• Speed: UI test automation is faster in orders of magnitude than human testers.
• Reproducibility and consistency: Automated mobile UI testing provides consistency and reproducibility compared to manual human testing.

Check out: Unraveling the Value of a Real Device Cloud in Mobile App Testing

Best Practices for UI Testing

Though there is no ideal user interface testing method available, some of the best practices for UI testing are as follows:

• UI testing is valuable, but one should never rely entirely on UI testing. Testers should always tally the input and output of the mobile UI testing.
• The tester should investigate particular test cases required in different browsers instead of applying all possible tests in all target browsers.
• The naming convention is necessary to make specific tests easier to understand and track immediately whenever required.

Checklist for your first test

UI component functionality and its design are multi-faceted. It needs attention to detail, good judgment, and defined scopes. For example, a tester should have a checklist to ensure all aspects of the frontend interface are covered in the testing, such as fonts, color schemes, hyperlinks, UI components, alignment, content, and expected behavior of the UI.

• Automated UI testing will need you to check the positioning, length, size, alignment, and width of all UI elements
• While performing automated UI testing, check data entry in fields for numbers, texts, special and invalid characters
• Software functionality execution
• Data type errors
• It is also important to check for navigation elements during automated UI testing
• Table scrolling
• Progress bars
• Error logging
• Remember to also check the shortcuts and menu items during automated UI testing
• Action buttons

Tools and Frameworks for Automated UI Testing

Mobile UI testing is carried out using automated tools and frameworks. UI testing tools are Selenium, QTP, Ranorex, and Cucumber. Whereas automated UI testing framework examples include Serenity, Robot Framework, Cypress, TestProject.io, Sahi, and so forth.

Conclusively, mobile user interface testing has become crucial for today's software development, and thus one needs to follow specific guidelines while carrying out mobile UI testing. The article has covered all the essential points necessary to start UI testing successfully.