Stop Guessing, Start Testing Why Enterprises Need to Introduce Front-End Testing to Improve the User Experience

Modern front-end applications, built on advanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks, have become far more complex.

This complexity means that companies must use front-end testing to ensure performance and accessibility, which is essential for retaining customers, creating brand loyalty, and stimulating sustainable growth.

Nevertheless, many developers still view testing as boring. In the current environment, only 55% of businesses conduct user experience testing. In this post, we’ll explain why front-end testing deserves your attention.

The Cost of Neglect

Introducing a new, untested feature or update into production can lead to application crashes, making users leave the experience even before you identify the problem. According to an IBM study, correcting production bugs is 15 times more expensive than managing them during the development process. In addition to the monetary burden, you will incur an immeasurable cost to your team's reputation and users' faith.

User Experience is King

The front end of your application is the first thing your customers see. It defines the user experience and shapes their first impressions.

Inadequate front-end testing results in critical problems that are not obvious, but once users discover a problem, it destroys their confidence in an application. 88% of users would abandon an app if bugs or glitches in the application affect the user experience.

Nevertheless, effective front-end testing deals with measuring the quality of components, such as interface rendering, available functions, and the response of application features, to make sure that these problems can be solved in the shortest period of time.

Modern Front-End Complexity

Modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular allow for the creation of dynamic user interfaces that respond to changes in their underlying state. A slight modification can lead to unforeseen errors. Each element presents possible failure points that manual testing alone cannot effectively manage. Automated front-end testing serves as a safety measure.

Cross-browser/Cross-device Challenges

Building web applications means developing adaptive interfaces across multiple devices and browsers while overcoming different combinations of OS-level differences and user inputs from disparate platforms.

Making assumptions based on what works on a single device (e.g., your personal device) is unwise. Testing involves using multiple, real devices instead of simply using the simulated screen sizes in browser-based developer tools. This approach requires human input while running through complete scenario sets.

Front-end testing evaluates the appearance and performance of your application across devices and software environments, ensuring a consistent experience regardless of how users access your application.

Regression Challenges

The less apparent assassin of trustworthy codebases is regression. It is often seen after a merge or addition of seemingly unrelated features. Bugs begin to appear where there were no bugs before. The reason? Unforeseen effects that ripple through state management or associated units.

Right after code additions, its tests show whether the additions damage existing functionality by mistake or whether a change to the user interface resulted in a critical operational failure. This early detection is crucial.

Performance Bottlenecks

Performance bottlenecks, invisible problems that impair a user's experience, are notoriously hard to diagnose within the convoluted architecture of a modern front end. They can occur for many reasons, such as a poorly written section of application logic, frequent screen redraws, unoptimized graphics, or even a sluggish third-party app.

Without a definite diagnostic plan, identifying the real perpetrator in such an unpredictable environment can be like looking for a needle in a digital haystack, causing much frustration and wasted time. It is precisely in this area where front-end testing can offer a data-driven prevention method. You establish an extremely critical baseline by designing tests that efficiently evaluate key performance indicators, such as how fast a given element appears on screen, how long critical functions take to appear, or the duration to execute a given task. This is your point of reference for what is considered good performance.

Refactoring Fears

Significant code changes can cause accidental changes that may result in mass regressions and destabilize the application. Unless adequate precautions are taken, even good-faith refactoring can create hidden bugs that impact other non-affected areas of the front end, leading to time-consuming debugging and system instability.

Front-end testing will help developers refactor confidently, providing a well-organized set of unit, integration, and end-to-end tests. Such an automated safety net makes it quick to check the effects of code changes on the system. The testing framework design will specify the intended behavior before refactoring commences, and running tests subsequent to any change will give unconstrained input in real time to ensure that the old functionality is not lost.

Wrapping Up

In a world where web applications are more complicated than ever and their user experience needs to be flawless, it becomes evident that automated front-end testing is no longer optional. The trial-and-error approach will also not work, due to unmanageable complexity.

Proper testing is the key to a positive, high-performance user experience. This experience leads to user satisfaction, which translates to a sustainable increase in your business.

At Oshyn, we are cognizant of these challenges, and front-end testing is embedded in everything we do. Our comprehensive testing strategy provides insurance for our clients' web applications, particularly those built with leading DXPs, including Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, and Optimizely. This helps to ensure user satisfaction and better performance. Contact us to see how we can help you get more out of your DXP investment.