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Building a more robust Wikipedia interface by spotting the differences (2023)

A look at how we leveraged visual testing to catch UI bugs when developing Wikipedia's new desktop experience.

And failing to spot these differences can result in a degraded user experience, loss of functionality, significant time spent resolving the issues, or worse. By March 2022, our team was about three-quarters of the way through a three-year-long project to update Wikipedia's desktop skin, which controls the appearance and layout of the page. The dimensions of its input kept changing in undesired ways, or the position of its magnifying glass icon moved as if an invisible magnet on the page was pulling it.

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