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Posted November 10, 2020

How To Do Multi-Touch Gestures in Live Testing

This post gives you detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform multi-touch gestures during live testing sessions on the Sauce Labs platform.

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Many organizations are working toward digital confidence by optimizing their testing practices. This may look like reconfiguring the delivery pipeline to integrate quality more meaningfully, moving test infrastructure to the cloud, and automating an increasing number of test cases.

While all of these are helpful steps on the road to achieving digital confidence, some use cases might not benefit from more automated testing. Those cases will still require manual, or live, testing to ensure that functionality works as expected. 

For example, one use case that may be difficult to automate is testing functionality like multi-touch gestures. This would typically require a real physical device and manual testing. 

Sauce Labs understands that this can be a challenge. That’s why the mobile devices in our Real Device Cloud are available for you to test multi-touch gestures while performing live testing. If you ever come across a situation where you need to pinch or zoom on your mobile device but you don’t have access to the physical device, Sauce Labs has you covered!

When you start a live session on the Sauce Labs real device cloud and open a website, you can swipe and scroll by clicking on the screen and moving your mouse in the direction you wish to move. This is the same behavior as you would have on a physical device that you would hold in your hand.

To show you how easy it is to ensure your customer experience is flawless, we have included step-by-step instructions of how to perform multi-touch gestures during live testing sessions on the Sauce Labs platform. Simply follow these steps, using www.netflix.com as an example:

1. To begin, hold down the ALT key (Windows) or the Option key (OS X). Two orange dots will appear on the screen, as you can see below:

2. For using zoom (also referred to as zoom in/maximize), make sure you move the dots further away from each other on the screen. This will result in the screen you are viewing to zoom in like this:

3. For using pinch (also referred to as zoom out/minimize), repeat step 1 and bring the orange points closer together: 

Best Practices for Performing Multi-Touch Gestures in Live Testing

  • Keep in mind that the multi-touch gesture starts from the center of the screen

  • For using zoom, it’s recommended to place your mouse at the center of the screen and hold down the ALT key (Windows) or the Option key (OS X)

  • For using pinch, place your mouse outside of the center of the screen and hold down the ALT key (Windows) or the Option key (OS X)

We have also provided a video walk through of this exact process below so you are able to observe the entire process. If you're using Sauce Labs, try out the functionality for yourself by logging into your account. If you don't have an account, but still want to try live testing on real devices, sign up for a free trial.

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Associate Product Marketing Manager
Wim Selles
Staff Product Manager at Sauce Labs
Published:
Nov 10, 2020
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