Try to ask any QA automation engineer the simple question “How to verify that element is presented on the page?”. The answer will be simple and obvious “It needs to check that element is displayed”.

Let’s try to look on this case from another perspective. How many times we’ve been using the web applications with terrible design? Yes, everything works as expected on the web pages and all the elements are displayed. But the main human’s instrument for perception of external world is the eyes and the brain. We see the world in 3D. But on the background human’s brain try to simplify the perception by dividing all the things into vertical and horizontal. If the things are aligned without these primitive options – then our brain will turn on another validator to catch what is wrong. This fact was proved by scientist few years ago.

So, this is just another validator of external world – and what? Yes, it sounds like nothing serious. Our brain is so powerful that can perform millions of validations per second.

The main problem is the next: once the brain is switching to another processes of the world perception, some of other important activities may be slowed down. What does it mean in the real world? Let’s back to the main topic.

Imagine the situation that user opens some web page of online shop because he/she looks for something not important for him, just for some different discounts and so on. Every day hundreds of thousands of the purchases happen exactly in such way. If the interface is simple with properly aligned UI elements – then customer will be concentrated on the searching of the stuff for buying. But if the elements have not proper alignment – background processes of the brain that are responsible for validation of external world will be working in the way to understand and stabilise the perception of the image that user sees at the moment. And at this moment it appears high possibility that user will forget about the main reason why he/she opened the web page.

If to look at the problem from the point of view of QA automation engineer it’s easy to understand that it is not enough to test that elements are presented on the page. And the main importance switches to the validation of how the elements are presented on the page. Kind of validation of perfect pixel.

Powerful framework Automotion is the best solution for Web and mobile automation testing to perform proper visual validation. It allows to validate the alignments of the elements on the page like how user would like to see it. The most powerful feature are extremely fast validation of the page on the different zoom levels of the browser and different page sizes. Validation for correct central alignment of one element or the group of similar elements. It’s a really smart validation of the page.

I hope that this article will help improve the quality of the applications.

Have a good quality!