Quality Assurance is the process we use to review the user interface and user experience while discovering any potential bugs or errors on the site. The process is relatively straightforward unless your site has a large amount of customization, interactive functions, or eCommerce elements, then it obviously becomes more complex. 

As developers, we do this constantly to ensure that the user interface and user experience are operating at the highest level we can deliver. There are many QA steps we take before a site is launched, but it is just as important to continuously ensure your site is running optimally and delivering the best user interface and experience possible. The rise in the use of mobile devices, the use of multiple operating systems and browsers, and changes in internet connectivity are a few of the variables that affect the UI and UX of your site daily. We recommend setting up or using a spreadsheet or template for the different sections of your website to track what you've tested, what issues have arisen, and what you need to have your developer fix. You can see one we recommend here. Alternatively, shameless self-plug here, you could hire Porters to do this for you, ensuring you will always have someone taking these steps to keep your site running optimally.

Make sure you hop on and do the following in order to keep users on your site, moving toward checkout while enjoying their experience.

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Cross Browser Compatibility

Keep it simple, stupid. Just kidding, you're not stupid. But do keep it simple. Especially when it comes to code. Keeping your code simple and reusable - and validating it -  is key to ensuring the highest level of compatibility. Provide fallbacks like javascript or flash, and use browser compatibility tools to help you to, you guessed it, keep it simple, stupid.

Keep It Secure

When it comes to your site, you need to act like it’s as vulnerable as a baby bunny. Checking and testing the security of your site regularly is crucial to a great UX/UI experience. There is any number of reputable vulnerability tests available that can help you, but it’s consistency that is key with this aspect of QA. By identifying and addressing potential security vulnerabilities, one can easily protect websites from attacks that could jeopardize the safety of data and the privacy of your users.

Payment Gateway

To the customer, nothing is more important than a seamless checkout process. Having your payment process fully flushed out and tested will allow for a quick and easy transaction that will leave your customer satisfied and willing to come back. Make sure you test the transaction end to end. Test and report on the numerous bugs related to data capture and data flow from the application to the Payment gateway. Some of these may be; Customer information not captured correctly, Credit card expiration date captured incorrectly, or incorrect functions causing transactions to be declined. 

Test Functionality

This is a bit of a catch-all but should be thoroughly completed. You should be testing the functionality of your site. Make sure confirmation and thank you messages display correctly. Make sure legal forms and pages are correct and up to date. Check the page load speed and test mobile compatibilities. Check spelling and punctuation, and links to your social platforms and contact forms as well. By frequently testing these, you’ll be ensuring that the functionality of your site won’t have a potential customer scratching their head and questioning coming back.  

Test Responsiveness.

Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts, flexible images, and cascading style sheet media queries. The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor's screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly. The number of people who use their smartphones for shopping, finding information, entertainment, and social networks is constantly increasing. It’s beyond important that your site is mobile-friendly and available on other devices. To ensure the best possible user experience for your users, avoid problems with the responsibility of your site.   

Check for Broken Links.

All the links on your site should be correctly functioning all the time. This is true of links to blog postings, social channels, landing pages, etc. You can go through on your own, or use link-checking software that will help you find broken links on your site. Nothing is worse than getting the attention of a potential customer only to have them stall on a page or link that doesn't continue their flow through your site. Get that fixed asap.  

Cookie Testing.

Cookie Testing checks the Cookies created in your web browser. Cookies are a user’s identity and are used to track where the user navigated throughout the pages of the website. They are crucial for eCommerce sites that need to populate a cart or quickly communicate between web pages. Test by disabling cookies, corrupting them, changing values, testing on multiple browsers, etc. to make sure the function on your site is correct. You can even use software to test this for you but in order to provide the best user experience, your cookies have to be functioning properly.