How to Use Multi-Device Testing to Your Company's Advantage

The landscape of the Internet is expanding at a pace no one imagined. Users are accessing content over a variety of platforms. This includes the traditional PCs and laptops and the new generation phones, tablets and televisions. Research done by statista indicates that by 2017, over 63% of the content will be accessed through mobile devices.With each device having it’s own characteristics, it’s hard to predict how data is presented on these devices. You may notice some problems with how content presents on smartphones, tablets, or desktop computers. Here are a few examples:

1. Misaligned content: With each device type having it’s own browser, content rendered on one device may not align the same way on another device.
2. Loss in image quality: Different devices have different resolutions, causing a loss or change in image quality
3. Text readability: This depends largely on the screen size of the device and the screen resolution. Devices with small screens may make the text totally or partially unreadable.
4. Change in touch areas: Pages designed with smaller touch areas become extremely difficult to use when rendered on devices with small screens.

These are the most common issues – others include page responsiveness, navigation, performance and compliance related issues. These factors make multi-device testing inevitable.

What is multi-device testing?

Also known as cross-platform testing, multi-device testing is the process of testing your website or application for compatibility across multiple types of devices, platforms and browsers.The combination of screen resolutions, display sizes, operating systems, device types and browsers is overwhelming. This makes multi-device testing an expensive and time-consuming process since every possible combination needs to be tested for.

Why is multi-device testing important?

It is common among users to start a task on a laptop and continue the same on their smartphones. Multi-device testing ensures that your users have a consistent experience across all devices and platforms.An application or website that loads differently on different devices can quickly attract negative reviews from users leading to a loss of revenue.While multi-device testing can be performed once the application is ready, it is best done from the beginning. This ensures that your application is multi-device ready right from the initial stages.Starting multi-device testing early also means you save a lot of man-hours which would be required if the bug is identified when the application is already in production.Testing your company’s website on multiple devices may require a lot of manpower, but in the end it can greatly benefit your workflow and output. In an economy with a growing millennial workforce, companies need all the tools at their disposal to improve performance across all devices.