Overcoming this challenge is particularly important as more and more people seek information via their phones. In September 2021, 69% of customers accessed nsw.gov.au on a mobile, 28% on a desktop and 3% on a tablet.
In the past, developers and Quality Assurance (QA) teams have relied on manual checks to look for visual issues. However, with so many sites and features added to the website, this has been time and resource intensive.
The problem with manual checking
Websites need frequent updating as bugs are fixed and new functionality is added.
The issue is that sometimes changing the code of one page of a website can result in things looking different elsewhere.
For example, updating the font size on the home page may affect image sizes on another page. A new font could also present well on a desktop computer but cause text to go out of alignment on a tablet. It is not possible to know this will happen without looking at the page.
Previously, ahead of a release of a new feature on the website, QA Engineers would go through a long process. They would load the same content on different browsers and devices and go through a checklist to make sure everything from text alignment to logo placement was consistent. It is easy to overlook things and difficult to capture every issue.
A new solution
With the OneCX program in place to migrate hundreds of NSW Government websites onto nsw.gov.au, there was a clear need to find a more efficient way to ensure consistency.
After searching for suitable solutions, we discovered Visual AI software, which provides the ‘sweet spot’ between human and machine when it comes to visual QA testing.
This tool takes a screenshot of the staging environment, which can be viewed after a web page has been updated, but before the changes are released. It then checks how the page would look on an iPhone, Android phone, desktop computer, tablet etc., comparing the difference between the ‘live’ and the ‘staging’ site.