Going back to school with eLearning and visual AI

As the eLearning industry realizes rapid growth during COVID, engineering and product teams choose AI-powered test automation to ensure optimal UX for digital training and education platforms.

Going back to school with eLearning and visual AI

Applitools announced the growing adoption of Applitools Visual AI for various eLearning platforms including EVERFI, Age of Learning, Imagine Learning and more. Applitools also uses Visual AI technology for its own online education platform, Test Automation University, which helps more than 80,000 software engineers gain knowledge and training for test automation skillsets.

The demand for e-learning has increased exponentially during COVID as has the need to deliver new features and capabilities to students in hybrid educational environments. Applitools Visual AI helps software engineering and product teams validate an eLearning platform’s user experience (UX) and uncover bugs in the user interface (UI) faster than ever before. It uses machine learning from more than one billion images analyzed in addition to AI enhancing data from over 130 different web browser and version combinations, various device viewports, and direct user feedback on UI defects, dynamic content, and more.

“Applitools has changed the way we approach QA, making us a faster, more consistent development team, as well as giving us more confidence in the quality of our product with every push to production,” said Alex Dinari, Senior Front-End Engineer at Age of Learning.

Over the past year, the closure of many businesses and educational institutions has resulted in the exponential growth of the virtual learning industry making a seamless UX vital to student and program success. As more and more businesses and institutions invest in virtual education and training, the eLearning market is predicted to surpass $1 trillion by 2027 according to Global Market Insights*. With such growth, the eLearning market is highly competitive and optimal user experience is imperative.

One example is EVERFI, a provider of online learning products. EVERFI uses Applitools visual AI to compare rendered pages quickly and efficiently at scale with ease. When designing its new common product platform, dev teams at EVERFI saw that a single development change could ripple across a range of courses with unintended consequences, affecting tens of thousands of web pages.

“Applitools lets us test almost 5,000 unique platform pages with confidence. We count on Applitools to help capture the hundreds of thousands of combinations that will exist across all the courses once all the courses get migrated,” said Greg Sypolt, Vice President of Quality Assurance at EVERFI.

EVERFI also faced problems with UX and opaqueness of the platform, making it impossible to know what users were seeing because of the variety of ways and places screens can be dynamically generated.

“How can we improve the user experience, if we don’t actually know exactly what our users are seeing? The number of permutations is overwhelming and was impossible for the UX team to navigate. Applitools provides instant access and validation to the massive inventory of screens and the peace of mind knowing that every regression is immediately spotted across all screen variations ensuring the user experience is exactly as it was intended to be. I feel like it is a transformative tool for our UX team and how we partner with developers to drive user experience," said Marianne Epstein, Director of UX design at EVERFI.

The growth of the eLearning market has expanded exponentially in the last five years and does not show signs of slowing down. Applitools is no stranger to this explosive growth and the challenges associated with delivering virtual learning experiences. Test Automation University and its new Automation Cookbook and Test Kitchen are examples of how Visual AI is ensuring dynamic learning and training experiences that will make an impact for a lifetime.