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3 Key Tips for Testing Your Web Site or App

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Testing is a vital part of any Software Life Cycle whether you are building a basic website or a complex app for your business. Given that the time given to Testing is very limited and the focus is always on launching the product, it sometimes results in sub-optimal test coverage often resulting in Bad User Reviews from your customers and Low Ratings on the app stores.

If you want to avoid this, here are some quick tips that would avoid this and ensure you release products with Minimum Viable Quality (MVQ) every time:

1.       Ensuring Business Needs

This is the basic and most common need of any Product or Application which is being developed to solve some real customer challenges. Understanding your target market and users, the user needs and common user journeys are critical to define the solution that will effectively solve the problem that your application is trying to address.

Whether you are solving an under-solved problem creatively or solving a problem that is yet to be solved for people a lot of focus on the core functions are critical to solving the problem.

Featuritis is best avoided and instead testing your hypotheses, testing your design prototypes (without even a single line of code being written) before your embark on a larger investment of time and budget.

2.       Creating a User Intuitive Design

Design Intuitiveness is the most important and critical aspect of any web site or app as it turns the visitors into customers and also makes them loyal to you. A great interface and interaction design that provides seamless user experience leads the user to repeatedly use your product.

Test early, test often, involve real users if you can (test crowd). It is important to also appreciate the fact that you or your developers may know the shortcuts/fixes/roundabouts to accomplish certain tasks, but your users may not necessarily know these.

Consider the following in your test design and perform tests accordingly with expert testers:

  • Good Navigation and Controls
  • Consistency across application
  • Good Colour & Text Combinations
  • Suggestions, Help & Guidelines
  • Online & Offline Notifications and SMS’s
  • User friendly design
  • Gestures
  • Screen Orientation

3. Securing Attacks & User Data

In this digital age that mandates 24×7 connectivity and involves collecting and storing user data for providing personalized services, user sensitive data is always major part of worry because the data when exposed may result in fraud, crime, attacks etc.

Therefore, it is vital that you must consider building a robust security layer right from the start if you are dealing with extremely sensitive data or once the product is functionally stable if you are building a generic product, towards the later part of product journey.

If you are short on budget, you may want to utilise the services of progressive security testing experts who will help you uncover the loopholes and charge you per vulnerability detected.

Some of the security parameters to be taken into consideration are:

  • Encrypting user data with strong algorithms
  • DOS attacks
  • Not exposing any sensitive data
  • Securing Payments

Originally published at http://startupbritain.org/3keytipsfortestingyourwebsiteorapp/

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