Keystone

Challenge

Study portals are loved by prospective students for one apparent reason – convenience. You don’t have to spend hours on Google to discover schools and education programs and then spend some more time gleaning specific information – study portals do the homework for you and guide you through advanced filtering and categorization.

However, not every degree search engine may be equally useful to a student. The handiness of such platforms depends on the ease of use, an abundance of educational opportunities worldwide, and the absence of malfunctioning website modules.

Keystone turned to QAwerk with a request to manually test all of their eight domains to better understand what kind of issues may deteriorate the user journey.

With an ever-growing number of higher education establishments joining the platform, new programs added daily, and other website updates, Keystone has struggled to maintain its websites fully functional and visually impeccable. They needed an independent testing agency that knew how to handle large content volumes efficiently, and QAwerk turned out to be the one.

Our major task was to ensure the user, a student from any part of the world, experiences no obstacles while searching and applying for programs.

Another crucial part of our work concerns localization. We needed to verify that all the content across eight verticals – Master, PhD, Law, Bachelor, MBA, Healthcare, Courses, Online – is fully translated and displayed correctly in over 40 languages.

Solution

At the beginning of our cooperation with Keystone, we conducted exploratory testing to understand what we were dealing with and what common bugs posed real inconveniences to students.

While performing a careful QA audit of the group of websites, we prepared testing checklists to systematize testing of various domains on multiple platforms.

Later on, we’ve elaborated our approach together with Keystone by defining the most critical user flows and prioritizing respective test scenarios. This strategy has allowed us to use the resources wisely and put the maximum effort into the areas directly affecting Keystone’s business and overall image.

Considering our client’s specific business needs, we’ve defined several testing types essential for maintaining the Keystone websites fully operational and appealing to users. Our regular checks include the following:

•  Functional Testing QA. Here we ensure users encounter no issues during registration or sign-in. We test if search filters work as intended; that is, the displayed data perfectly matches each user selection. We check if various application and contact forms can actually be sent and follow all the necessary validation rules, such as the inability to send an empty input. Buttons and links are also tested to prevent any flaws in navigation and warrant a frictionless browsing experience for the user.
•  UI/UX Testing. This type of testing is necessary to eliminate visual defects that hinder users from going through their usual flow from start to finish. We test from the end user’s standpoint, ensuring the web content is readable and all embedded videos are playable. UI bugs are mistakenly regarded as insignificant, yet if the user is deprived of information for technical reasons, that is a significant drawback.
•  Compatibility Testing. Considering the large number and diversity of Keystone users, compatibility testing is an absolute must. To provide a satisfying browsing experience on desktop devices, we tested Keystone websites in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. We’ve also prepared a selection of iOS and Android devices to check website responsiveness in mobile Chrome and Safari. We test only on real mobile devices to guarantee the high accuracy of our reports.
•  Localization Testing. Supporting several domains in over 40 languages is a daunting and resource-consuming task, especially when localization is done with the help of machine translation. In the latter case, the chance of errors is relatively high. To simplify this process and save a ton of time, we partially automated localization testing. We wrote a script that crawls every single page across eight verticals and documents translation issues into an Excel file. While it is launched manually, it is reusable and doesn’t require much involvement from QA engineers.

All in all, we’ve worked out an optimal testing schedule and fine-tuned our testing strategy to be sure we do only the meaningful work and can consistently test the entire group of websites.