Browser & User Testing

Browser Testing and Cross Compatibility

At the moment there are 7 main groups of browsers (think of them as brands if you like) each one has multiple versions. Some of these versions vary in the way that they display your website. This is where you need GPMD to carry out full browser testing to make sure your website looks and operates in the same way across all of them. Here's a list of the browser groups:

Internet Explorer Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) is one of the most popular browser today. IE was introduced in 1995 and passed Netscape in popularity in 1998.

Firefox Firefox is a browser from Mozilla. It was released in 2004 and is one of the most popular browser today.

Netscape Netscape was the first commercial Internet browser. Netscape was introduced in 1994, but gradually lost its popularity to Internet Explorer. The development of Netscape officially ended in February 2008.

Mozilla The Mozilla Project has grown from the ashes of Netscape. Browsers based on Mozilla code are the largest browser-family on the Internet today.

Opera Opera is another Internet browser. Opera is known to be fast and small, standards-compliant, and available for many operating systems. Opera is the preferred browser for a number of small devices like mobile phones and hand-held computers.

Apple Safari Safari is Apple Computers free web browser.

Operating Systems

It's not just browsers that have version differences. Certain browsers render websites differently on different operating systems. For example, Safari on a Apple OSX may be different to Safari on Windows. This needs to be tested too.

User testing

To make sure your website project has the maximum change of reaching your audience in the way you intend we strongly advise a user testing programme. There are several methods of user testing a website. Here are the basics:

The Paper Test

This is a fun and very interesting way to test your wireframes and / or designs with a typical user. Essentially you print out your website (preferably before it's been built) and ask an independent user to use their finger as if it were a mouse. You will quickly see if you have any issues with the way the layout and navigation is structured.

Screen Recording

This method is a little more elaborate than the previous. However, watching either a live stream or a captured video of a real live user browsing your website will certainly show you if there are any problems. Moreover, it will usually show you what you need to change to improve the website.

At the very least get your friends, family and colleagues to go through the entire site, clicking on every link and reading the content as they go. It takes a long time but it's definitely worth it in the long run. Here at GPMD we run a Bug Tracker application so that whenever we find an issue we can log it and assign it directly to a developer.

All this testing will highlight any issues with the front-end mark-up which we can address before we promote your website to the world.