Cross device testing is the process of testing a website or an application on several devices that the user may interact with. It’s essential for capturing possible shifts that may occur due to differences in the screen size, display quality, operating systems, or browser compatibility.
Users interact with websites and applications through different platforms, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs. While consumers benefit from a consistent experience across these very disparate devices, for businesses and developers, making the transition and maintaining as frictionless an experience as possible is not merely a desirable end but necessary.
The problem here, though, is that one has to ensure that a website or app that is developed for, say, a tablet or a smartphone will function and look properly on other devices, systems, and platforms. This is where cross-device testing comes into play.
Cross-Device Testing: Why is it Important?
With the mobile traffic outdoing the desktop traffic, it is now crucial to have a consistent experience across the two. A consumer who visits your website through his iPhone should get a similar experience to that of a consumer with a Samsung Galaxy or a computer. This increases brand reliability and also encourages users to interact with those brands more.
Furthermore, if a website poorly performs, especially on one device, it implies high bounce rates and lost conversions which impacts the bottom line.
With an increased number of companies adopting the mobile-first philosophy, the objective of cross-device testing is to ascertain whether there is any problem that might come up in specific devices or browsers before a user does. It also makes sure that regardless of where the users are coming from when engaging with your product, they are presented with a seamless interaction interface that is easy to operate and easy on the fingers.
Cross-device approaches that are focused on testing need to be incorporated with specific strategies being employed for their effectiveness. With the knowledge of what cross-device testing is now, let’s take a closer look at some tenets that will help with the testing of experiences across each device.
This kind of testing involves evaluating a website’s operation, performance, and usability across a range of gadgets, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This testing guarantees that, irrespective of the device type, the web application will function reliably and offer a positive user experience.
Strategies for Improved Cross-Device Testing
When proceeding with the definition of device coverage, one should take into consideration users’ characteristics.
Each particular website or application has its own target audience and, therefore, people using these devices may have different preferences. Thus, the first thing that should be implemented before cross-device testing has to be an examination of the user statistics and use data to identify the most frequently used devices, operating systems, and browsers among users.
For example:
- Do most of your users use iPhones or Android smartphones, or do they use other, third brands of smartphones?
- Do they think that tablets are better than laptops?
- It may depend on the browser they are using, that is, is it Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, among others?
Making a distinction between the type and usage of your audience will enable you to select the devices and browsers you want to test in order to use the testing resources well.
Prioritize Responsive Design Testing
Responsive Web Designing guarantees that the formatting of the site you develop adjusts to the available screen space. In the era where one has several devices such as a computer and a phone, a properly functioning website that is good on a computer but awful on the phone will just make the user angry. Each of these types of cross-device testing helps to see whether the different Responsive components of the website, i.e., grids, images, and menus, adapt to the specific sizes of screens of the specific devices that are being used in the testing.
Automate Testing Across Devices
Exercising manual testing on multiple devices takes a lot of time and also involves human mistakes. Automation is a way of testing that enables developers to test their apps on different devices, browsers, and operating systems all at once, thus minimizing on time consumed but not on coverage. Automated cross-device testing tools can run quickly, give a quick visual comparison, and highlight the areas where the outputs differ overwhelmingly.
For instance, LambdaTest, an AI-powered test execution platform, provides a wide variety of choices in testing and gives the users an opportunity to test in over 3000 browsers, devices, and operating systems to help find out any challenges that might be associated with web device testing but without the physical devices.
The last step that should be implemented is testing the application on real devices and not emulators.
Even though we are able to conduct initial tests with emulators and simulators, real device testing is a key element for understanding what exactly a website or application will do when it is exposed to real conditions. Emulators may fail to reproduce such things as performance problems, touch control, or hardware-related mistakes.
LambdaTest is a popular cloud-based testing platform that has both an emulator and a live device to perform testing. This way of evaluating a website or an app’s performance is useful as it provides a dual perspective, taking into consideration the performance of the website in both desktop and mobile versions.
Focus on Performance Testing
We know cross-device testing is also not limited to checking the resemblance, but it also involves how that particular site performs. Performance can vary drastically across mobile networks, hardware, and browsers, so it’s important to evaluate: Performance dramatically depends on the used mobile networks, hardware, and browsers so one has to test.
Conduct Accessibility Testing
One thing that must always come within an experience is accessibility. It is important to design for disabled users to be able to consistently use your site or application as well as being so as to be compliant. When doing cross-device testing, do not forget to check out the accessibility of the design with a screen reader, keyboard navigation, etc. This way, you can test how the text scaling, contrast issues, and the interactive elements of your website look across different devices and screen sizes.
Don’t Forget Browser Compatibility
It is also necessary to test your site across different browsers besides testing across different devices. While cross-device testing centers on distinct devices, web device testing highlights the importance of compatibility with the most used browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge.
A tool like LambdaTest makes cross-browser compatibility testing easy as you are able to test your site on the browsers you wish and also even on the older versions to make sure your site or App is well optimized on all the multiple browsers. It also allows detecting problems that may occur in only some versions of browsers or at the utilization of specific browser engines.
Browser Comparison for Cross Device Testing
Another challenge that developers experience while cross-device testing is browser inconsistencies. All browsers have their own methods of executing code since they utilize dissimilar rendering engines, which can result in performance and layout disparity as well as issues relating to functionality.
Chrome vs. Firefox
Chrome utilizes the Blink engine platform built for speed and performance and also cuts page load times and animations. On the other hand, Google Chrome is rather greedy in terms of memory usage and may slow down the work of devices with lower performance.
Firefox browser is built with the help of the Gecko engine, in turn, pays more attention to such aspects as confidentiality as well as compliance with requirements established by certain standards. Of course, Firefox behaves fairly stable, but it can treat some styles as flex-box or grid, for example, slightly differently than Chrome, which leads to the appearance of shifts.
Safari vs. Edge
For instance Safari, Apple’s native browser, has a distinct approach to handling animations, input fields, as well as different media formats, especially on Apple devices. This can be observed because it follows Apple’s privacy and security policies to the letter; this leads to problems related to third-party resources or scripts.
Edge is built on Chromium outside of sharing compatibility with Chrome but it has its peculiarities, for instance, related to the handling of web components, fonts, or certain outmoded web technologies.
Conclusion
Some of the important testing processes include cross-device testing since it determines how your website or app will display and operate on different devices and browsers. As users have come to demand a responsive and flawless experience on each device, testing for just the desktops is not enough.
A cross-device testing strategy that involves the use of LambdaTest will be very productive and effective as it facilitates the testing of the application user interface across many devices to ensure its optimization across the devices.