Mobile technology has brought us some fantastic benefits, but with always available, always connected technology, it can have a negative impact when it demands our attention and distracts us from the real world.When was the last time you enjoyed a meal with friends without it being interrupted by people paying attention to their smartphones instead of you? How many times have you had to watch out for pedestrians who are walking with their faces buried in a device, oblivious to their surroundings? We have to shift our design focus from technology to the world around us. As smartwatches and wearables become more popular, we need to create design experiences that allow us to create experiences that are still engaging, but less distracting.
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Professional automated testing software is a solution to a common problem: how to produce high-quality, robust and reliable software with the ever-growing complexity of technology and under massive competitive pressure. Automated software testing is a cost-effective solution to this problem. In this article, Ville-Veikko Helppi will walk you through a sample use case for test automation and will provide a downloadable example to get you started. Also, he’ll focus on different aspects of mobile test automation and explain how this relatively new yet popular topic can help mobile app and game developers to build better, more robust products for consumers.
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Testing is a critical process that developers should integrate into their workflow to minimize the number of bugs that get caught in the quality assurance phase. In this article, Lawrence Howlett shows you what to consider when creating a front-end testing plan and how to test efficiently accross browsers, devices and web pages. Front-end testing also needs to be budgeted for — with time, resources and money. Whichever tool you pick, stick with it, define a process and put the effort in. The result will be a better website, with significantly fewer bugs.
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In this article, James Rosewell outlines common challenges and how to configure Google’s new Universal Analytics to efficiently overcome them, using features such as custom dimensions, enhanced link tracking and server-side data feeds. Universal Analytics is a powerful tool, and it is prepared for a world in which designers get a single report of all interactions, including for websites, native applications and real-world events. Happy analyzing!
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To help balance the craving for visual simplicity with the need to keep websites easy to navigate, you can borrow some concepts from the world of wayfinding. In this article, Dennis Kardys will show you how you can apply these concepts to the mobile web. Keep in mind that every person who browses an application is making their way through a space — often an unfamiliar one. As the user embarks on their journey, what types of wayfinding assistance are you providing to guide them?
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“Crashes” and “Not working” are the most common feedback on Google Play for unstable or sluggish apps. Lousy apps. Those comments and ratings make hundreds of millions of potential downloaders skip those apps. Sounds harsh, but that’s the way it is. The most successful mobile app developers understand the importance of performance, quality and robustness across the array of mobile devices that their customers use. But you must know that an app can behave differently on a variety mobile devices, even ones running the same OS version and identical hardware components.
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As much as we aim to design our mobile apps and websites for contextual use, testing their usability in context can be challenging. One approach to mobile testing is participatory design. A participatory design test session typically takes about an hour and has four parts. In this article, Marina Lin conducted this type of study while researching how visitors to Cars.com’s app use their mobile device while purchasing a car on a dealer’s lot.
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Why should you care about who’s using a mobile device and who’s not? Because people often behave differently when browsing on a phone versus a desktop. Costs can vary widely by device and visits from mobile might provide more or less value to a particular advertiser. Also, you might want to drive mobile users to different pages than desktop users. So, how do you build a campaign that targets only mobile devices via AdWords? The short answer is you can’t. However, a number of workarounds are available. First, let’s look at a couple of AdWords features that focus spending on mobile: bid modifiers and mobile-preferred ads.
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Back then, when every home had broadband and before anyone had a smartphone, we were living in the Golden Age of web development. We never knew how easy our jobs were. Because of all the things we have to support now, testing has become really difficult and also super-expensive. Now with responsive web design, we have at least 15 browsers working on a myriad of different-sized devices, with many different input types, multiple pixel resolutions and hugely varying connection speeds. There must be a better way to deal with the problem that responsive design has created for testing. In this article, Tom Maslen will devise a testing strategy so that you don’t have to test every device every time you want to update a live website.
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Responsive Web Design and tools like Modernizr have become very popular. Recently, combination techniques, where optimization is done both server-side and client-side, has become a trend. The recently launched WURFL.js tool, fits into this category. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås and Luca Passani will look at some basic use cases of how to use WURFL.js to optimize the user experience both in HTML and CSS, and an example of how to choose the right ads to display on different devices.
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