Remote Debugging Options for Mobile Developers

Summary:          

Mobile debugging is hardly proving successful on desktop tools, as simulation of mobile user experiences and its related problems are not possible with desktop screen as well as its pointing devices. Therefore, remote debugging with real mobile devices offers the best-fit debugging solutions.

Remote Debugging in Mobile

Intro:

For mobile app developers, designing and programming user experiences are challenging tasks at each stage of development. As, real UX is only possible with real devices our attempts to simulate or emulate UX on our desktop or laptop machines is a futile exercise.

Role of Simulators & Emulators

However, practically testing our iOS or Android applications on each real device is not a feasible option at all because of cost, availability of devices, and time spend on testing. Therefore, most of mobile application developers are using in-built simulators provided in SDK of the respective OS platform. For instance, Apple offers official simulators in its Xcode and you can easily use them on your Mac machine. You can test iPhone and iPad screens with their hardware version and iOS version variations. 

Similarly, Android provides emulators for Android devices through ADT tools in Eclipse and in Android SDK. You can create Android Virtual Device (AVD) for the choice of your real Android device to test and can beat the huge fragmentation related issues on the Android platform. For rest of other mobile platforms, you have to rely on their official simulators or emulators such as BlackBerry Simulators, Windows Phone Emulators, Opera Mini Emulators, etc. 

Unfortunately, these desktop based simulators and emulators are only providing limited help in debugging the mobile issues, as they never allow us to physically tap or touch the screen with our big or small fingers or thumbs. They never allow us to rotate or flip the devices to see accelerometer effects in real life. These are some real problems for real UX, which can only be addressed through real mobile devices.

Role of Remote Testing

It is true that Apple is releasing new set of iOS devices each year along with new version of iOS. At other hand, Android is infamous for its hardware and software fragmentation due to myriad of device manufacturers and backward version of Android OS in use in the market. Thus, one thing is obvious neither any individual developer nor any company can afford to buy such heap of devices with big budget. In due course, remote testing labs are offering remote testing services at affordable rates, which are either a community with a pool of devices or through a pool of some manufacturing companies. 

For instance, Samsung’s Remote Test Lab enables you to test variety of Samsung devices using web-based interface to interact with real physical devices and get feedback through remote monitoring software or screen cast sent back to your machine. Keynote Mobile Testing and Open Device Lab are other options to use for remote testing.

Remote Debugging

If you do not want to use remote testing lab option, for many minor and real-time issues are arising frequently, during your course of mobile app development, you have another option to connect your real mobile devices with your development machines using USB like cable connector or Bluetooth like wireless connection. Thus, you will inspect your source code in-action on the real mobile device on your development machine and correct them immediately. 

For iOS devices, Apple has introduced Web Inspector tool in Safari for devices that corresponds with desktop Safari browser and let you perform your debugging tasks easily and in cheap ways. There are wide ranges of developer tools in Web Inspector of Safari that enable you to tap even DOM elements on your mobile devices and access DOM information on your desktop.

Similarly, for Android Google has introduced powerful Chrome Developer Tools in its Chrome browsers of mobile as well as desktops. Thus, you can leverage tons of debugging tools like DOM inspector, Network panel for external resources, Source panel for JavaScript inspection as well as to set breakpoints, and JavaScript console for entire set of JavaScript related debugging.

Unfortunately, not all mobile application developers are accustomed with such remote debugging tools for real world mobile user experiences issues. Thus, they can’t address excellent user experiences in their mobile app development projects. Fortunately, Lujayn has updated team of mobile developers who can address your UX related issues beautifully with cost-effective ways.

Let Us Comprehend CUBI — A User Experience Model Part 6

In the last 5th part of this series, we have seen interaction designing for UX in the UX designing CUBI model. Before it, we have seen the role of content in the UX in second part, while in third part, we have seen how to integrate user goals in the UX design and about business goals in the fourth part. Now, keeping our journey continue in the exploration of CUBI model for UX designers, we will analyze which factors are influencing the user experiences on web and mobile software products and across the diverse screens.

Today usability is prime area where we focus the most, but user experiences are something more than that and rewarding better than mere usability of the product. Thus, apart from the above described layers in the CUBI model, we have to understand and learn about the some important factors that highly influencing the UX designing process while we use CUBI model. Let’s check this user experience factors under the umbrella of CUBI model.

Branding Experience in UX Design

Our general perception of brand is many times limiting up to logo, color theme, and some designing elements. However, in UX designing, branding is not up to visual identity, but extending up to tonality and totality of the brand experiences at every touch point for users. Therefore, it is drawing quite broad picture of branding in any UX design hence it is the most challenging factor for the UX designers where they have to extend their reach at all business processes, business components, communication, transactions, production, and final outcomes of the business.

Comprehensiveness Experience in UX Design

Comprehensive means understanding, clarity, unclutteredness, and organization. If your product design is following the above traits in the design, you can say that you are giving comprehensive experiences to your end-users in the products/software. In due course, you have to make your design scannable, categorized, labeled, and with lack of any ambiguity at all. Thus, it is imperative to avoid excessive corporate lingo, jargon, slang, or unreadable messages at all steps and touch point of the design and organization experiences.

Usefulness Experience in UX Design

If your client organization or its end-users don’t feel any usefulness of your product then you are wasting your time and client’s money both. Therefore, your UX design should address target audience, their needs, and empower them to be productive to achieve their intended user goals and business goals efficiently. If your product is useful or your design proves its usefulness then you will see some tangible changes in their behaviors, actions taking on the product, and their overall performance.

Usability Experience in UX Design

Usability experiences in UX design are:

• Easy to use product design experiences
• Intuitive design experiences
• Findable design experiences
• Learnable design experiences
• Legible design experiences
• Consistent design experiences
• Communicative design experiences
• Progressive design experiences
• Accessibility design experiences
• Functionality design experiences
• Corrective design experiences

It is true that very few people can understand such UX designing paradigm in the industry and fortunately, Lujayn has top-notched UX designer in its web development and mobile app development teams so you can leverage your business using their expertise and experiences at premium price tags.

Author Bio:

Shoaib Marfatiya is an eminent writer in web development industry and its verticals. He has contributed a lot by throwing light on very intricate issues of web and mobile development community.