What Is Visual Testing? Best Practices & Benefits

Product developers conduct visual testing to identify errors that other tests might miss. This ensures that the design team’s vision is accurate throughout the product.

Visuals are essential for ensuring a seamless user experience. Your product users expect the product to look the same across all devices, and consistency is critical for enhanced user experience.

Identifying visual bugs in this earlier testing stage can prevent issues from reaching end-users after the full launch. Actively assessing the product saves time and resources that can be spent later to fix errors. A polished product that is visually appealing and consistent also protects your brand's reputation, demonstrating a commitment to detail and quality.

Visual testing supports rapid development cycles. Visual testing helps maintain high-quality standards with frequent releases in agile and continuous delivery environments. Automated visual tests can verify quickly that new changes haven’t introduced visual regressions.

Functional testing verifies the software against the functional requirements. The process involves checking the product's functions by providing inputs and comparing the output to the expected results. It ensures the software performs as intended.

Visual testing focuses on a product's appearance and how the user interface works. Functional testing is dedicated to evaluating whether the product works correctly—it doesn’t detect visual discrepancies.

While different, both functional and visual testing are essential for ensuring a product is as good as it can be before it’s released.

There are typically two types of visual tests: manual and automated. Each has its benefits and potential drawbacks, so it’s essential to consider what would work best for your product.

Manual visual testing

As the name might suggest, manual visual testing is the process of manually inspecting a product's user interface (UI) to identify visual defects.

Testers will manually examine the layout, font usage, colors, alignment, and overall design to ensure they appear as intended across all devices.

Manual testing relies on human observation to detect inconsistencies and issues that other tests might miss. It encourages human intuition, which can be valuable for the user experience but can take time. There’s also the potential for inconsistencies when noticing the details.

Automated visual testing

Automated visual testing uses automated visual testing tools to assess the visual aspects of a product. It involves comparing the current state of the UI against a baseline to detect discrepancies in the design.

The process of automated visual testing helps quickly identify visual errors that you could easily miss during manual visual testing because of human error.

However, there is an initial cost for setting up automated visual testing tools, which can take time and be expensive. The tools may also require regular updates and potentially miss specific problems.

Despite this, visual testing tools are generally more efficient and accurate. You can use them in conjunction with manual visual testing to reduce the number of potential product errors.

Before beginning the visual testing process, you must familiarize yourself with some best practices.

Understand the product

Become familiar with the product before testing begins.

Take time to explore the UI and make sure you know what it does. You can then confidently conduct visual testing and understand what needs to be assessed.

Define the scope

There are two main product areas you should focus on: structural elements and the interface.

Structural elements include the layout, color scheme, and font usage. The UI consists of all the click-through buttons, the menu, general navigation, and other functional elements like images, graphics, and videos.

Inspect these two areas to stay within the scope of the test.

Build the testing environment

It’s vital to ensure your testing environment supports all the devices and browsers the product will be used on.

Ensure all display components function correctly across all scenarios, checking they are visually consistent no matter where your customers may access the product.

Act like a user

You’ll notice more if you step away from your internal role as a tester and put yourself in your users' shoes.

Interact with the product as a typical user would. Pay attention to performance issues and glitches, considering what would frustrate product users. Closely observe how these issues manifest across different devices, as errors are unique depending on how the product is accessed.

Take notes

Take detailed notes of all your findings and observations while you conduct visual testing. Document any changes or discrepancies in the software, including minor details, to guarantee nothing is missed or forgotten.

Collaborate with designers

Once you have all the details on what improvements need to be made, you can contact the product designers.

Communicate bugs with designers and other stakeholders after visual testing is complete. These errors can be amended with their assistance, and the product realigned with the overall objectives.

While the test itself is important, what you do with the results is even more important.

Start by collecting all the visual testing results from your automated visual testing tools and notes from your manual inspections. Include everything from screenshots, logs, and written notes on identified visual discrepancies.

Once gathered, sort the errors into categories. Because the focus is visual bugs, these categories will likely be layout issues, color theme problems, font discrepancies, and alignment errors. You can then prioritize the categories of defects based on how they could impact the user experience.

Next, compare the current state of the UI against design specifications. Note any discrepancies to understand the extent of the changes and assess whether they are consistent across all devices. You can share these findings with the designers to get their valuable input on appropriate fixes.

Lastly, trends should be monitored by tracking recurring issues that might become apparent over multiple testing cycles. There might be underlying problems in the design process.

Amplitude boasts a robust and visually detailed interface that identifies the bugs in visual testing.

Use Amplitude Experiment platform to personalize your visual testing process and guarantee a high-quality product at the time of release. Everything you need for the test is consolidated into one easy-to-manage interface that enhances analytics and optimizes the visual testing process.

Working from one place vastly improves collaboration between designers, developers, and stakeholders. It also scales testing across teams and avoids miscommunication.