Debugging User Interface (UI) Issues in Mobile Apps: A Comprehensive Guide

User Interface or UI refers to the visual and interactive elements that users interact with when using a mobile app. It includes layouts, designs, and presentations of different app-related interface components like text fields, buttons, menus, images, and so many other graphical elements that a good app needs.

Attractive UI captivates the users with an enhanced experience while interacting with the app so, it will be important to keep in mind to design the best possible user-friendly interface to allow users to have a seamless experience while accessing the app’s functionalities. Despite attempting to build a well-executed UI for an app, some bugs could still persist to affect the overall app’s performance.

Sometimes, UI issues can be challenging to identify and resolve just like trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti with a pair of chopsticks—just when you think you've got it, another noodle jumps out😁!

So, proper expertise is essential for the systematic debugging of an app. This article is for exploring different debugging methods for UI-related issues.

📥Key Aspects Associated with a Good UI Design

A good UI design for a well-functioning app needs several key aspects for creating a visually appealing, intuitive, and user-friendly interface. Here, a few of them are demonstrated in the following figure.

The primary goal of a well-designed UI is to create an attractive and user-friendly interface that allows users to easily understand and interact with the app's functionalities which involves the thoughtful arrangement of elements, appropriate colour combinations, font sizes and styles, visual cues, and many more.

The debugging process can be performed systematically as follows:

📥Understanding Common & Complex UI Issues or the Bugs to Solve

⬇️Common Bugs:

Here are the most common UI-related bugs associated with mobile apps.

👉🏿Layout issues:

This issue consists of inconsistent or broken layouts, overlapping elements, and misaligned views that can disrupt the user experience. Here is a code example of the issue and its solution.

Misaligned Views:

Code Example:

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/textView1"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:text="Text View 1" />

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/textView2"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:text="Text View 2"
    android:layout_marginTop="16dp" />

✅Debugging:

Here, you can adjust the alignment of views by using proper layout attributes like gravity, layout_gravity, or layout_alignParent.

For example, to align the second TextView with the first TextView, you can use layout_alignTop:

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/textView1"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:text="Text View 1" />

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/textView2"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:text="Text View 2"
    android:layout_alignTop="@+id/textView1" />

👉🏿Unresponsive controls:

It includes non-working UI features like buttons, input fields, or interactive elements that fail to respond to user interactions.

✅Debugging:

To debug the unresponsive controls issues, try the following strategies:

• Verify interactions to ensure that user inputs and actions are properly handled and everything is in the expected behaviour.
• You can perform repeated regression testing to ensure that new changes or updates do not introduce issues into previously functioning interactions.
• Keep collecting user feedback and reports that provide valuable insights into the effectiveness and usability of the app's interactions.
• Examine UI blocking operations to confirm that interactions do not cause the app's user interface to freeze or become unresponsive.
• Check the event handlers to verify that the app correctly captures and processes user interactions (such as button clicks or gestures).
• Verify interactions to ensure that the app's intended functionality and user experience are consistently delivered to users.

👉🏿Inconsistent rendering:

Rendering refers to the process involved in the generation of a 2D or 3D image from an app program. UI elements that display differently across different devices or screen sizes can lead to a lack of visual consistency and that will often be problematic.

As shown in the figure, the app is not performing properly on specific devices.

✅Debugging:

Try the following strategies:

• Reproduce the issue to understand and investigate the problem thoroughly.
• You can test the app on different devices and OS versions to ensure compatibility and identify any device-specific issues.
• Checking layout files ensures proper arrangement and responsiveness across various screen sizes and orientations so it is important to prefer and also manage density independence to ensure.
• Handling multiple screen sizes involves adapting the UI layout and elements to provide a consistent experience on different devices.
• Check resource files to guarantee that all necessary assets are present and correctly referenced in the app and review custom views or custom drawable to ensure their correct implementation and proper rendering in an app.
• Consider GPU rendering and hardware acceleration to optimize the app's graphics performance for smoother rendering.
• You can use a layout inspector or debugging tools to identify layout issues, view hierarchy, and UI rendering problems during debugging.
• Test the app with different themes and styles to ensure consistent and visually excellent user experiences across various design choices.
• User feedback and reports provide valuable insights into issues by allowing for prompt resolution and overall improvement.
• Regression testing ensures that new changes or fixes do not introduce new issues or disrupt previously working features or functionalities.

👉🏿Performance issues:

App performances get affected due to various factors such as slow animations, sluggish scrolling, and delays in response time.

✅Debugging:

Try the following strategies:

• You could define the performance metrics to allow for the measurement and evaluation of the app's efficiency and responsiveness and also identify the performance hotspots to detect the affected areas of the code that require optimization for improved performance of the app.
• Monitor memory usage to ensure efficient memory management and identify any memory-related issues or leaks if they persist.
• Optimize UI rendering to enhance the app's responsiveness and also evaluate network operations to assist in identifying and optimizing potential bottlenecks by reducing latency and improving overall app performance for a better user experience.
• Next, analyze database queries to ensure efficient data retrieval and manipulation by optimizing app performance.
• To check parallel execution and synchronization-related issues, Check threading and concurrency.
• Optimize resource usage (such as CPU and battery consumption) to improve the app's performance and Keep analyzing third-party libraries ensures they are optimized and compatible by minimizing their impact on app performance.
• Gather user feedback regularly and utilize analytics which provides valuable insights to identify performance issues and prioritize improvements.

👉🏿Accessibility problems:

Adoption of the app is determined based on how easier it is for any sort of user so, UI elements that are not accessible to users with disabilities can limit the app's usability.

✅Debugging:

To address the app accessibility problem, try the following:

• To ensure inclusivity, it is important to understand accessibility guidelines and standards so, manual testing with assistive technologies can help to identify potential accessibility barriers.
• Check keyboard navigation to ensure that users can interact with the app using only the keyboard.
• Accessibility testing tools can automate the detection of common accessibility issues.
• Provide alternative text for images to enable users with visual impairments to understand their content and verify colour contrast to ensure readability and accessibility for users with low vision.
• Use semantic markup to enhance the accessibility and understanding of the UI elements of an app.
• Test voice guidance and feedback to guarantee an inclusive experience for users relying on screen readers.
• Consider focus management to ensure smooth and intuitive navigation for the keyboard and assistive technology.
• Seek user feedback and conduct usability testing with individuals using assistive technologies which help to identify accessibility improvements and also keep updating the app.

⬇️Complex Bugs:

Complex issues can arise in the mobile app and sometimes, they remain unnoticed for a long time. Here are some illustrative code examples as the solution for such cases.

👉🏿Slow or Stuttering Scrolling:

Probably you have also faced slow scrolling while using some mobile apps through a long list of complex UI. This is due to the bugs associated with the app UI system.

✅Debugging:

You might love to use view recycling and asynchronous loading of data techniques to

optimize the list or UI rendering. Here is a code sample.

RecyclerView recyclerView = findViewById(R.id.recyclerView);
recyclerView.setLayoutManager(new LinearLayoutManager(this));

List<String> dataList = getData(); // Retrieve data for the list

MyAdapter adapter = new MyAdapter(dataList);
recyclerView.setAdapter(adapter);

👉🏿Unresponsive or Laggy UI Interactions

This can be the most annoying issue as several UI elements or actions (such as button clicks) take a long time to respond or go unresponsive.

✅Debugging:

One of the effective solutions is to move time-consuming tasks or heavy computations to background threads to keep the UI thread responsive for an enhanced user experience.

Here is a code sample:

Button myButton = findViewById(R.id.myButton);
myButton.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        // Perform time-consuming task on a background thread
        new Thread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                // Perform the task
                // ...

                // Update UI on the main thread if needed
                runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
                    @Override
                    public void run() {
                        // Update UI elements
                        // ...
                    }
                });
            }
        }).start();
    }
});

📥How to avoid some common UI design mistakes?

If you are focused on designing the best and most attractive app, care to start from the small details or elements. To give the best impressions to users, it is really crucial to avoid some common UI design mistakes which are as follows:

👉🏿Unclear Form:

Some confusing forms result in users leaving the app from the very first stage. The form is the first thing that the user starts a journey to the app after creating an account. As shown in the following diagram, just showing an “Error” message for an incorrect password could make the user confused.

✅Solutions:

Just using the “Red Colour” indicator may not give an exact clue to the users, try offering detailed clues to take action like “Password Reset”.

👉🏿Poor touch target

Poor touch targets could make users frustrated while accessing the app functionalities. Have a look at the following figure. An option (say play button) provided on the left side is too small to click.

✅Solutions:

Make finger-friendly touch targets by enabling the size best suited for any sort of user.

👉🏿Bad icons selection and placement:

Unmanaged and wrong icon selection is another UI design mistake. Irrelevant and different-sized icons cannot give a better user experience.

✅Solutions:

Use high-quality vectors for your app icons that look sharp with proper contrast. Try to choose a meaningful icon. For example, in the above figure, an icon for music (on the left side) is wrong and icon sizes are not looking to be matched.

👉🏿Too many features

Sometimes, including too many features in an app could be problematic as some specific devices may not handle them due to the limitations in the hardware and software resources. It causes several issues like complexities and slow loading UI to affect the overall performance of the app.

✅Solutions:

For the best practice, you might try offering the limited features correctly to the users. If your business app should consist of so many features then you can try to include them in the regular updates without breaking the customer relations and trust.

👉🏿Poor IA

Here, IA stands for Information Architecture. Generally, most UI designers do not care to include the proper information in the app features. Users may not love to spend much time understanding the app features and functionalities of the information infrastructure that are not properly implemented in the app.

✅Solutions:

Perform the research to understand the user’s interests and prioritize the information management systems in your app features and functionalities. For example, you can adjust a note to tell the function about some target elements.

Challenges When Debugging UI issues

Debugging app UI issues can sometimes be challenging due to various factors like the complexity of modern UI frameworks, variations in devices and browsers, and the inherent difficulty of reproducing and isolating the issues. Here are some common challenges you might encounter when debugging UI issues as shown in the diagram.

Conclusion:

A well-executed UI design is essential for capturing and retaining users' attention as it influences their perception of the app's quality, usability, and overall satisfaction. By focusing on creating a well-decorated, visually pleasing, and accessible UI, app developers can enhance user engagement, and encourage mass app usage or adoption. Debugging UI issues in mobile apps requires proper expertise and a thorough understanding of common to complex problems. By utilizing logging, testing, analyzing performance, and employing appropriate debugging tools, developers can effectively identify, diagnose, and resolve UI-related issues. Remember, proactive debugging and continuous improvement of the UI are crucial to maintain user satisfaction and driving the success of mobile apps.