Blog
May 17, 2022
Mobile applications are integral in today’s world, and the mobile app market is projected to generate more than 613 billion U.S. dollars in revenues in 2025. Users have high expectations for mobile apps—they expect them to function perfectly, without delay or interruption.
Users have higher expectations for mobile apps than ever, therefore you must invest in designing positive experiences on mobile devices and test for such. Here are some mobile UX best practices to consider.
Mobile UX Best Practices
Improve DevOps Maturity
Improving DevOps maturity can help you deliver the ultimate mobile UX. To deliver the best mobile UX, you need to release faster. So, as you improve activities like CI/CD, you can get releases out faster and with higher quality.
Having CI/CD pipelines that can support daily releases, for example, will help you deliver the ultimate experience to your mobile users.
Automation is key to achieving this. To succeed with automation, you’ll need tools, training, and strategy.
Leverage Test Automation
Test automation is also essential to keeping up with mobile UX best practices. Test automation has advanced over the past few years. But the average success rate is around 50%. That’s because teams face challenges including:
- Higher costs to develop and maintain.
- Longer execution time.
- Greater possibility of false negatives.
It is important to leverage test automation best practices to conquer these challenges. You’ll need to build up your automation. And you’ll need to integrate testing mobile applications in your development process, so it isn’t done separately.
Consider the test pyramid as you leverage automation. For instance, unit tests are a great starting point for test automation.
We asked two experts in a virtual panel discussion about how their teams have approached testing. Here’s what they had to say:
“Our focus is really on the API layer testing. There are a huge amounts of API calls that we have to deal with, and a complex variety of customer types, and policy types, and product types. We do have automation tools in there and that's the area we focus on. There will still always be a need for some manual testing there because of the complexities that we have.”
— Chris Thompson, Global Head of Mobile at Aviva
“For us, the testing pyramid includes a bit more steps. We've gone and defined even a few extra things. The thing is, what's the weight of each one? And I know some companies, they invest heavily on UI testing. We don't invest heavily in UI testing. On the contrary, we're investing heavily on unit testing.”
— Giorgios Ampavis, Director of Client Engineering at Tide
Increase Test Coverage
There are so many versions of mobile operating systems, devices, and browsers. And new ones are released all the time. Plus, foldable phones are on the horizon and new features are coming in Android 11. You’ll need to ensure proper test coverage across these in order to deliver a better mobile UX across all these devices.
Using a mix of real devices, emulators, and simulators in a test lab can help you ensure that you have your bases covered.
Get guidance with the Test Coverage Guide >>
Innovate and Prepare for Future Trends
Preparing for future trends is another important mobile UX best practice. However, many organizations spend a lot of time focusing on bug fixes or performance enhancements instead of investing in leading-edge features. It is important to keep a pulse on technology trends and try and anticipate what customers are going to be looking for in terms of mobile UX.
For instance, 5G will allow us to do things that are much more graphically intense and processing intense as well. Whether that' is through AI or through assisted reality and virtual reality, the interface will change as well. This will have a massive impact on how we test for those things.
It is important to try and anticipate what customers are going to be looking for in terms of mobile UX as new technology rolls out. Those who can embrace modern technology trends and innovate for such will be able to stand out and create better user experiences that shine in the market.
Test How Load Affects Your Mobile UX
Day-to-day, your mobile apps may be performing normally, as you expect. But what happens when your app receives an influx of visitors? Are you prepared for spikes in app usage? Events and situations such as Black Friday, peak travel season, weather emergencies and more can have an impact on your end user experience.
Unless you perform load testing against your mobile UX, you can’t just assume that your apps will provide the same, excellent user experience across extreme high vs. low traffic periods. Without proper load testing, you risk exposing your customers to sudden app crashes and slow performance. And you can guarantee that you’ll see a rise in support tickets and poor mobile app ratings rolling in.
Do not wait for your mobile users to have these negative experiences. You must incorporate load in your overall mobile UX testing so you can simulate real user scenarios and ensure your apps work well under all types of traffic conditions.
Ensure High Mobile UX With Perfecto and BlazeMeter
To stick to these mobile UX best practices above, teams must be equipped with the right tools to set them up for success.
Using Perfecto’s automated testing platform and mobile device cloud, you can create and execute your tests faster, on a greater scale, and with better test coverage. This frees up time so your team can innovate and accelerate testing, and ultimately release faster.
Additionally, Perfecto and BlazeMeter are the first combined solution on the market to run performance tests from a mobile user’s perspective. With Perfecto and BlazeMeter, you can test both your mobile user experience and your backend under load in the cloud and scale up to two million virtual users. This allows you to simulate realistic mobile traffic patterns and test your app with greater confidence. See for yourself how Perfecto and BlazeMeter can help your team achieve these top best practices and ensure a high mobile UX.
See for yourself how Perfecto and BlazeMeter can help your team achieve these top best practices and ensure a high mobile UX.