A complete guide to UI testing: how to test, validate, and improve your user interface

A seamless user interface (UI) is vital for delivering a great user experience (UX). Without UI testing, you risk launching a product with usability and functionality issues—leading to user frustration, negative reviews, or customer churn.

Effective UI testing helps you create deeper connections with your users and deliver an experience that delights customers and exceeds their expectations. Sounds great! But where to begin?

This comprehensive guide takes you through the UI testing process from start to finish. It also covers UI testing techniques and practical steps for conducting them.

Plus, you’ll learn how incorporating a platform like Contentsquare into your UI testing workflow helps you gain insights into user behavior, identify issues, and validate UI improvements, ultimately making your testing process more efficient. 

What is UI testing?

UI testing or user interface testing is a type of software testing that focuses on checking the appearance, functionality, and usability of different kinds of user interfaces, such as

• Graphical user interface (GUI)

• Command line interface (CLI) 

• Voice user interface (VUI)

Here’s is a quick refresher on a typical software development life cycle (SDLC) and how UI testing fits within it:

1. ✍️ Planning: product managers, product owners, or business analysts define the requirements

2. 🎨 Design: UI/UX designers create wireframes or high-fidelity prototypes using tools like Figma

3. 💻 Development: developers evaluate the design, build the software, and perform unit testing

4. 🧪 Testing: software testers or quality assurance (QA) engineers identify and report bugs, developers fix them, and QA retests

5. ✉️ Deployment: software is deployed and made accessible to customers

6. 🛠 Maintenance: software is continuously evaluated and updated

📝 Note: the Agile methodology may involve early testing of wireframes and prototypes before development starts to save costs and improve efficiency. Smaller teams may have blended roles, with members adapting to meet project requirements (e.g. a UI designer taking on testing responsibility or a developer handling UI prototyping and testing).

How is UI testing different from UX testing?

UI testing is inherently related to UX testing: after all, optimizing an app or website’s appearance, functionality, and usability contributes to optimizing the overall user experience. 

In this way, testing the UI may help you identify defects or issues that would have impacted the UX. 

However, UI testing tends to focus on things like visual elements and design. Whereas UX testing focuses on the overall user experience through user satisfaction and usability.

Some consider UI testing a subset of UX testing due to an overlap of testing scope and collectively call it UI UX testing. No matter your opinion, you need both to create an exceptional user experience. 

The differences between UI testing and UX testing

What are the different UI testing techniques?

Manual testing and automation testing are the 2 primary UI testing techniques. Here's an explanation of each—what they are, and their pros and cons.

Manual UI testing

This technique involves a person (usually software testers or QA engineers) manually testing a website or an app interface by checking various UI elements like buttons, forms, and menus. They evaluate the website's usability, accessibility, and navigation using different user scenarios.

Automated UI testing

Automated UI testing involves using automation tools to test the website's UI. Testers create test scripts that mimic different user scenarios and are run automatically to check the website's functionality.

Both manual and automation UI testing techniques have advantages and disadvantages. Choose the method based on the website's specific requirements, resources, and goals of the testing process.

📝 Note: some people think of regression testing, smoke testing, end-to-end testing, and more as UI testing techniques. However, these are broad categories within software testing and differ based on their purpose:

• Regression testing: retesting after a code change to ensure new updates or fixes don’t impact existing functionality

• Smoke testing: quick, high-level assessment to verify critical features and basic functionality

• End-to-end testing: testing the complete user journey, ensuring seamless component integration

• Browser-compatibility testing: verifying compatibility and consistency across browsers/platforms

• Accessibility testing: evaluating against guidelines (e.g. WCAG) for usability by people with varying abilities

• Usability testing: involving real users to assess ease of use, efficiency, and satisfaction

How to do UI testing in 8 steps

As we mentioned, the UI testing process will differ depending on the project’s scale and your team’s size. Below, we share the standard series of steps to conduct effective UI testing. Follow the process as is, or iterate based on your unique business needs and team structure. 

1. Gather test requirements

First, product owners, product managers, or your client’s representative—commonly an IT business analyst (BA)—share test requirements with the testing team and review design or development specifications and mockups. 

A QA engineer might collaborate with the product, design, and development teams to define expectations based on the development and software testing stage.

2. Set UI testing strategy and objectives

After gathering requirements, specify the goals and scope of UI testing, and develop a plan that aligns with the overall project goals and ensures a comprehensive product examination. Our list of UI design principles might be of help here.

For example, decide how UI testing fits broader quality assurance goals. The strategy should also outline the testing team’s roles and responsibilities, the test environment, and the testing schedule. 

Consider adding experience analytics tools (like the ones available on the Contentsquare platform) to your UI testing workflow to gain insights into actual user interactions and experiences and inform your objectives.

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare to better understand user flows and interactions by monitoring user behavior.

Use Session Replay and Heatmaps capabilities to optimize your UI testing approach, especially when adding features to a live site. That way, you can create comprehensive test scenarios and minimize missed defects.

See what your users see with Session Replay

3. Develop test scenarios and test cases

Outline possible user interactions and scenarios, and identify critical UI components and features to test. Create detailed test cases for each scenario, including expected outcomes, to ensure software testers check all aspects of the specific functionality.

Include negative scenarios, such as inputting an alphabet in the Age field and observing the results. Develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) to standardize processes and improve your team's software testing efficiency over time.

📝 Note: some projects may require you to start UI testing by checking the prototypes built on tools like Figma—before front-end developers start with the UI development—while other projects may test the user interface only after a working application is ready.

4. Choose the right UI testing tools and techniques

Selecting the right UI testing tools and techniques is essential for executing a test plan successfully. A poor testing approach and the wrong suite of tools might trick you into thinking you’re making progress—when you're actually wasting time and resources.

Decide on manual testing, automation testing, or both, depending on your project's requirements and complexity. 

You’ll need a defect-tracking application like Jira to manage and track your test cases and defects for both types of testing, and an automation testing tool like Selenium to create and execute test scripts for automation testing efficiently.

When evaluating testing tools, consider factors such as

• Ease of use

• Compatibility with your tech stack

• Cost

• Credibility of the software storing your company's confidential data 

Keep reading for more tips on selecting the right UI testing tools in the next section. 👇

5. Execute and document UI tests

Perform manual and automation testing as planned during the execution phase.

Then, let someone in your team—perhaps a QA analyst or engineer—walk through the application for manual tests, mimicking user behavior and checking for inconsistencies or issues. Automated tests are typically executed using test scripts that interact with the application and verify expected outcomes.

To ensure a smooth, consistent user experience, test across various

• Devices, like phones, laptops, and tablets

• Browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

• Screen sizes (by adjusting the window size on your computer, for example) 

• Mobile operating systems, like Android and iOS

Document your test scenario execution with detailed steps, screenshots, or session recordings or replays to provide context for collaborators.

6. Report your findings and track the defects

Compile your findings and report the bugs after executing the test cases. A defect tracking or project management tool helps you better organize and track these software bugs.

Include information such as the steps to reproduce the issue and the expected and actual result in your defect documentation. Also, add screenshots or session recordings of the faulty functionality to help developers and other teams understand the issues at a glance.

💡Pro tip: once your website is live, use Contentsquare’s Session Replay to easily share bugs or production defects with your team. 

This collaborative feature lets you share the most critical replays, together with their URL paths, time spent, corresponding events and timestamps, and frustration scores. Need even more details? Your replay event stream also includes the option to

• Quantify event impact: jump to Impact Quantification and analyze how that event affects user behavior

• Shortcut to error details: expand the Error Analysis page to understand the root cause quickly and how to fix it

Contentsquare’s Session Replay lets you @mention specific teammates and leave comments to add more context for a fix

7. Review and validate fixes

Once the development team resolves the issues, review and validate the fixes by retesting the affected areas. You can also do high-level testing of related features that have a history of malfunctioning due to code changes. This process ensures the fixes are successful and do not introduce new bugs. 

For example, after fixing a broken 'First Name' text box, check whether the 'Full Name' text box that's interdependent on it works correctly. 

8. Continuous UI testing and improvement

UI design isn’t a one-time task—it’s an ongoing process of testing and optimizing to meet evolving user needs.

To maintain a high-quality user interface

• Treat UI testing as an ongoing activity

• Regularly update test cases and scripts to reflect changes in the product, such as new features, updates, or bug fixes

• Incorporate user feedback and analytics to identify areas for improvement

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer (VoC) capabilities to monitor user behavior and identify any pain points or bottlenecks in the UI for continuous improvement. 

• Surveys: gather feedback from users during their website journey. Launch a broad range of surveys as popups or links, targeting specific pages or actions. Gain insights into user motivations, measure satisfaction, and identify usability issues.

• Interviews: recruit and schedule interviews with the right users seamlessly, automating the user research process. Recruit participants from your network or tap into Hotjar's extensive pool of 175,000+ participants. Engage records, transcribes, and enables team collaboration—turning insights into actionable results.

• Feedback collection: collect in-the-moment feedback through a customizable widget. Users can rate their experience, provide context, and even self-report defects by attaching screenshots of elements they love or hate. 

Feedback attached to a specific page allows for quick and responsive fixes of website bugs

Which tools are used for UI testing?

Testing your product’s UI the right way requires tools that broadly fit into the following categories.

1. Prototyping and design tools

UI prototyping and design software enable designers to create, test, and iterate user interface concepts. By simulating user interactions via these tools, designers can identify and address usability issues early in the software development stage.

Our pick: Figma

Figma is a freemium all-in-one UI design platform for teams

Figma enables designers to create wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes to share with the development and testing teams. A widely-used tool in the category, it also helps facilitate collaboration and ensures everyone is on the same page.

Alternatives: InVision Studio and Adobe XD

2. User behavior analytics tools

Behavior analytics tools track user actions through visualizations like heatmaps and session replays, revealing user behavior and customer journey patterns. With a thorough knowledge of how users behave on your website or app, you can create comprehensive test cases, ultimately enhancing user experience and interface design.

Our pick: Contentsquare

UI insights from Contentsquare’s dashboards

Contentsquare (that’s us 👋) is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform, helping teams analyze user behavior with journey analysis, heatmaps, session replays, user testing, user feedback, surveys, interviews, and other valuable platform features. Use Contentsquare for a deeper understanding of how users interact with your UI to create data-backed testing strategies and identify areas of improvement.

Alternatives: Mixpanel and Fullstory

3. Automation testing tools

Automation testing software aids UI testing by automatically running predefined test cases, reducing manual effort. These tools are extremely helpful in testing software projects with complex and extensive functionalities—like an ecommerce website with more than 50,000 products. 

Our pick: Selenium

Selenium is a flexible automation testing tool

Selenium is an open-source automation tool that simulates user interactions and verifies whether the interface behaves as expected. It’s used for automating testing across various browsers and platforms and offers tools for creating advanced automation scripts. 

Alternatives: Lambda Test and BrowserStack

4. Test case management tools

A test case management tool helps organize, track, and manage test cases and their execution in the software testing process. It simplifies collaboration among team members by ensuring test cases are documented, prioritized, and executed efficiently. 

These tools’ reporting and tracking features also enhance visibility into the testing process and help identify areas for improvement.

Our pick: TestRail

TestRail helps you manage, track, and organize your UI testing process

TestRail is a test case management tool designed to help software testing and development teams manage, track, and organize their testing efforts. It streamlines the testing process with features like test case documentation, test planning, and reporting. The tool’s integration with bug tracking and project management tools, such as Jira, further boosts collaboration and workflow efficiency.

Alternatives: Zephyr Enterprise and PractiTest

5. Defect tracking tools

A defect or bug-tracking tool reports, tracks, and manages software bugs during software development and testing. These tools help maintain software quality by providing a centralized platform to track and prioritize defects. 

Many popular project management tools offer defect-tracking features, which you can use for multiple stages of the SDLC.

Our pick: Jira

Jira is a popular project management tool for UI testing

Jira by Atlassian is a project management and issue-tracking software widely used by software development and tech teams. It offers a comprehensive platform for managing tasks, tracking bugs, and organizing workflows. With its robust collaboration features and customizable interface, it helps users plan, track, release, report, and automate various stages of software development. 

Alternatives: ClickUp and Monday.com

💡 Pro tip: take a step-by-step approach to improving your user interface with the ultimate UI testing checklist.

Together, these UI elements help you create a seamless experience that delights your users. Download our comprehensive UI testing checklist to start optimizing.

The Contentsquare UI testing checklist

Perfecting your UI testing approach

UI testing is vital to building great software and ensuring customers have a fantastic experience. By combining manual and automated testing methods and using the right tools, you can spot and fix issues more effectively. 

One platform that makes a real difference to your user interface testing is Contentsquare. It shows you how your users interact with your product in real time so you can understand what they love, hate, and feel indifferent about. Use this data to decide where to focus your UI testing efforts and build a product your customers love. 

UI testing FAQs