The Most Popular Programming Languages in 2024

In the design and operation of digital products, it is essential to detect errors and ensure that these products fully comply with specifications (both generally accepted and defined by their owners). For example, in the field of healthcare, using such solutions directly impacts the health and life of patients and the level of efficiency of medical services. So, let’s delve into this topic. 

Objective of Quality Assurance in Healthcare App Development

So, let’s find out why QA is important. In general, it is one of the integral parts of software development, especially in the medical field. After all, in the field of medical services, the fate of the patient's life and health is decided every day. Digital solution that looks and operates as intended (of course, thanks to the quality assurance benefits) provides the ability to prevent all potential errors as efficiently as possible and ensures that applications meet modern medical standards. 

Regarding the importance of quality assurance in healthcare applications, the following points can be distinguished:

• Safety of patients: At the heart of QA in healthcare software development is patient safety. The timely testing of healthcare applications that could impact a patient's health is a critical aspect. This includes verifying medicine dosage, ensuring the accuracy of diagnostic algorithms, and the functionality of the patient monitoring system. Any malfunction, even for a brief period, can lead to serious errors, underscoring the importance of reliability assurance.
• Data privacy: The guarantee of absolute protection of patients' personal data from unauthorized access. Due to their specificity, medical applications regularly process a huge amount of information, so the introduction of modern encryption methods is critical.
• Compliance with regulatory requirements: A number of modern healthtech standards like HIPAA and GDPR are created for a reason. Therefore, absolutely all software should be developed to meet these requirements. Civilized countries actively implement official app development rules. If these laws are ignored, it is undoubtedly a direct path to legal accountability, with all the attendant consequences. The implementation of reliable digital solutions reduces the chances of getting a fine or a lawsuit until the loss of a license.
• Optimization of regular processes: The higher the efficiency of the application, the better the performance and accuracy of work within the medical professional team. In this way, medical staff can access the necessary information, thus minimizing the time spent on data processing. This guarantees both speed and high accuracy of decision-making regarding the further treatment of patients.

Risks Associated with Poor Software Quality in Healthcare

No one will argue that some medical institutions ignore the risks of using legacy software that doesn’t meet the modern healthtech regulations. However, this is a very serious and critical topic that can significantly impact patients' safety and lives and the effectiveness of daily processes.

Numerous errors, incorrect diagnoses, and, as a result, incorrectly prescribed treatment all directly threaten the patient's life and health. Also, do not exclude the occurrence of legal and reputational problems (fines or a prominent indicator of loss of confidence on the part of the public, both patients and employees of a particular medical institution). Unreliable digital solutions automatically complicates the interaction between employees. It leads to a decrease in the productivity of daily medical practice because it complicates the possibility of uninterrupted access to all necessary data and the exchange of information between departments and specialists.

Types of Testing in Healthcare Applications Development

There are different types of healthcare application testing, but the most common and popular among them are the following types:

• Performance testing: It includes analyzing the application's speed of action and navigation, taking into account different levels of load.‍
• Regression testing: It defines how much each of the module functions meets the requirements.‍
• Security testing: It implies checking the protection of each patient's data from illegal access by unauthorized users.‍
• Usability testing: This example of quality assurance in healthcare is designed to evaluate how user-friendly the application is, ensuring it is convenient for both healthcare industry employees and patients of all ages.

Healthcare app testing features are primarily critical, including the need for strict compliance with regulatory requirements and safety regulations.

The Future of Quality Assurance in Healthcare

Now, knowing the answer to the question: “What is quality assurance in healthcare?”, let’s talk about its future. Specifically, today, we can define three the most sustainable trends:

• Implementation of AI and ML-based solutions aimed at automating the testing process, independently identifying bugs, and preventing them in advance;
• Combination of DevOps and Agile, which ensures closer interaction between development and testing teams, ultimately reducing the number of bugs and speeding up their fixing;
• Using cloud-based testing platforms that provide scalability of QA healthcare scenarios without compromising the budget.

However, in the coming years we can expect something more revolutionary than the actualization of the above-mentioned directions since the healthtech sector is actively invested in by both governments and private institutions.

Conclusion

Now, you know the answer to the question: “What is quality assurance?” and can understand the role of QA in software testing – generally speaking, it is crucial regarding ensuring patient safety and the performance of the healthcare delivery process. Minimizing risks during the medical quality assurance process and creating reliable medical applications are possible only through the use of modern technologies and compliance with all official standards provided by a qualified service provider.

If you are working on a digital solution, one of its integral stages will be UX/UI design. While trivial projects usually have “beaten” paths for creating navigation and visuals, any deviation from the standard can lead to dissatisfaction among end users and increase the entry threshold for them. In this regard, no matter how sophisticated the logic of your project is, it is important to understand the usability principles maintained by human psychology to ensure its excellent user experience.

Theories of Perception in UX/UI Design

Generally speaking, there are several popular theories of perception in UX/UI design:

• Gestalt psychology aimed at gaining an understanding of how people associate individual objects with things that are meaningful to them. The main gestalt principles include figure-ground (according to which some objects, depending on their visual appeal, are perceived as key navigation elements, while others serve as background), similarity (according to which elements with identical visual characteristics are perceived as interconnected), proximity (according to which closely placed objects are also perceived as related to each other), and closure (which states that incomplete objects, if sufficiently detailed, can be perceived by users as complete).
• Affordance theory, claiming that to ensure intuitiveness, users should receive some cues from the interface from the very beginning on how to deal with a particular element – one way to do this is to use skeuomorphism;
• Hick's Law, which states that the time it takes a particular user to make a decision is logarithmic to the number of available options (which means that to maximize intuitiveness, the user's choice should always be limited);
• Fitts' Law, stating that the time it takes a user to reach a desired part of the interface depends on its size and distance (which means that to ensure a great user experience, you need to place interactive elements closer to the user's starting point);
• Signal Detection Theory, claiming that users can subconsciously distinguish between meaningful cues (calls to action) and background noise, meaning that they should be visually separated.

Cognitive Load: Its Effects on UI Design

Now let's move from theory to practice and consider individual insights extracted from the above theories of psychology in UX. 

In particular, the first insight is the minimization of cognitive load, that is, the efforts of the human brain that must be applied to perform a specific target action. Thus, the importance of reducing the amount of information or tasks provided to the user becomes clear – otherwise, there is a high probability that the user will begin to act erroneously. 

In practice, such brevity can be achieved by correctly grouping interrelated elements and removing elements whose functionality duplicates each other.

Emotional Response & UX Design

Another valuable insight from UX design and psychology is to establish an emotional connection with the end user through your interface. This is a global task that begins with user behavior analysis and identifying their desires, pain points, and intentions and ends with transforming the obtained information into design elements that resonate with them. 

Ultimately, you will have to walk in the shoes of the average consumer of your software solution to ensure the proper level of empathy with your emotional design. In terms of practical implementation of the emotional response, such user empathy can be achieved through the integration of “user experience stories” that can be presented by a service provider to users as they get acquainted with the digital solution, as well as the use of the right color palette, forms, audio, pop-ups, and text.

The Role of Memory in User Interaction

Since, according to cognitive psychology in design, the average person can concentrate on one object for up to 20-30 minutes, it is important to take this aspect into account if your software solution involves long-term interaction with it. 

Specifically, you can reduce the load on your users' memory by implementing elements and scenarios that work and occur in a way that is familiar to them. Otherwise, if something does not function as expected, it can lead to users’ confusion and erroneous actions. 

Understanding User Behavior Through Heuristics

Heuristics are specific UI design principles that can predict user psychology. Here are some of them:

• Visibility of system status, which implies the importance of informing end users about what is happening with your software solution at the moment through progress bars, loading animations, or status messages;
• Match between the system and the real world, which emphasizes the importance of correspondence between the system's behavior and the knowledge and experience that users received before they became familiar with your software solution;
• User control and freedom, which implies the need to provide end users with the ability to freely navigate your software solution and manage negative scenarios;
• Consistency and standards, which determine the significance of logical connections between elements, terminology, and layouts;
• Error prevention, which consists of preventing erroneous actions by end users by providing them with unambiguous and understandable instructions;
• Recognition over recall, which states that to ensure better intuitiveness, users should “recognize” familiar patterns from the real world in elements and scenarios of your interface.

Thus, you have to perform a heuristic evaluation to check whether your solution is good in terms of usability. Also, note that in reality, there are many more psychology UI design heuristics, but the above list will be sufficient for a basic understanding of what is meant by the term excellent user experience.

The Impact of Attention on User Experience

Many designers, in order to encourage the user to perform a particular action, abuse pop-up notifications and other features to attract attention, thereby increasing the cognitive load, the inadmissibility of which we have already discussed earlier. 

Instead, you can use such approaches as the correct building of a visual hierarchy, optimization of the color palette, breaking down complex processes into several simple ones, etc. And, of course, do not forget to appeal to the memory of users, which already contains some experience of interaction with other digital solutions and can automate some processes of dealing with them due to the familiarity of the mental models implemented.

User Motivation & Reward Systems in UX/UI Design

Finally, from the point of view of UX psychology, many UX/UI designs benefit from gamification, which motivates users to move toward the target action. In general, gamification is aimed at boosting user engagement and creating an exciting user experience that they don’t want to interrupt. Its main elements are rewards and recognition.

At the same time, it is crucial to note that some reward systems are too confusing for the average user and, thus, create unnecessary cognitive load instead of motivation. Moreover, gamification is not considered a universal approach that could be used in any project. Therefore, you have to always start with the appropriateness and the affordance of implementing this concept clearly and simply for the consumer.

Conclusion

We hope that with the help of this article, you were able to understand the importance of UX design psychology and how it is implemented in UI/UX principles like heuristics, emotional response, lowering cognitive load, user motivation, and others. If you are interested in creating a digital solution that fully meets all these psychological principles, feel free to contact us.

When you are going to create a new web solution from scratch or optimize an existing one, one of the key indicators of top high quality will most likely be a high response rate (to user actions) and SEO-friendliness. 

Unfortunately, client-side rendering, which is done by default in many modern web frameworks and libraries, can become an antagonist for developers pursuing these two goals. In this case, it makes sense to consider the possibility of implementing server-side rendering. Below, we will explain to you what it is, what its features are, with the help of which software tools it can be implemented, and also for which projects it is best suited. 

Definition of Server-Side Rendering

Generally speaking, server-side rendering (SSR), as is probably clear from the name, occurs on the backend side. First, the browser sends a request from the client side to the server, after which the SSR server returns an HTML page with all the necessary meta tags, styles, markup, and other attributes. Then, in the browser, the rendering itself happens, the results of which immediately become visible to the end user.

Why is all this necessary if you can use the default option, client-side rendering (CSR)? – you may ask. In fact, everything is simple: search engine crawlers do not recognize the SEO text contained on the pages (or the page, if it is the only one) of the CSR solution. Thus, if the CEO occupies a significant part of the promotion strategy of your project, you can achieve better results only by implementing SSR. Let us add that projects with sophisticated business logic may “suffer” from CSR in the context of performance since the increased load in the form of several synchronous requests will lead to delays in the interface’s response to user actions. And this is exactly the case where server-side rendering can also become a win-win solution.

Currently, SSR technology is actively used in such world-famous solutions as Airbnb, Upwork, YouTube, Netflix, Uber, etc.

What Are the Benefits of Server-Side Rendering?

Now, based on the above, let's look at the key benefits of SSR.

• SEO and social media friendliness. The server side render approach ensures improved SEO ranking through the correct indexing of pages – now, search robots can recognize SEO text and other attributes important for good ranking. First of all, this is due to the fact that now, search robots do not need to read SSR JavaScript code. As for friendliness for social platforms, it is explained by the ability to display colorful previews when sharing SSR-rendered pages – all due to the correct recognition of meta tags. 
• Better app/website performance. SSR rendering provides a faster initial page load as the JS to HTML conversion is done on the backend. Thus, users see refreshed content faster than with CSR, in particular when it comes to dynamically updated pages. In the long term, this can ensure a reduced bounce rate for websites and web applications. 
• Lower load on the user's device and better user experience (UX). Due to the fact that user requests are now processed on the server side, the user device will experience minimal load. All that remains for it is to interpret the HTML code returned by the server.

What Are the Risks of Server-Side Rendering?

To ensure the objectivity of our review, let's also analyze the disadvantages of server-side rendering.

• Higher TTFB. TTFB or time to the first byte is one of the highest priority indicators of good (or, vice versa, insufficient) performance of web pages. This parameter indicates the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte of page data processed on the server side. Typically, compared to CSR, the TTFB value is higher because instead of returning a file with links to JS, the server spends some time converting JS to HTML code.
• Limits on the number of requests simultaneously processed on the server side. Due to the increased load on the server, the number of requests processed synchronously will be less than in the case of client-side rendering. Thus, the server throughput will be reduced.
• Need to wait for all the HTML code to load. While the page is loading HTML code under SSR, the user will not be able to perform any new actions on it.

If we add to the above disadvantages a fairly high entry threshold into SSR, as well as an increase in the budget of such projects (due to frequent requests to the server), it becomes clear that this approach is not suitable for everyone.

Server-Side Rendering Frameworks and Tools

As for the server side rendering frameworks and libraries that can be used to process client-side requests on the backend, these include React, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Angular (v7 and newer), and Svelte/Sapper. They use one of the most universal server-side templating languages – JavaScript.

Below we propose to consider server-side rendering React concepts only since React is one of the main tools that we use in web development.

Server-Side Rendering vs Client-Side Rendering

Server-side rendering is not a one-size-fits-all solution since there are situations where its alternative, client-side rendering, is the best choice. In particular, if the content on web pages is updated dynamically – that is, it requires the rendering of some components only (i.e., those with whom the user interacted) while the whole page doesn’t need to be updated, CSR is better suited since part of the content with which the user did not interact will be already loaded.

However, considering that during initial initialization, the content is not displayed until the page is fully loaded into the browser (this can take 2 or 3 seconds, which is critical for a modern consumer of Internet content), when implementing CSR, the site may have poor SEO regardless from the professionalism of SEO specialists (note that this is not a default situation, because with the right approach, lightweight projects with CSR are still ranked well). And this is where the SSR React approach can come to the rescue as usually, React server side components are well-recognized by search crawlers. Thus, by resorting to it, you will be able to ensure enhanced content visibility for search engines.

Server-Side Rendering: SEO vs. Performance

As you can already understand, server-side rendering is capable of providing the best SEO performance for solutions that really need it. In particular, thanks to this approach, search engines will not need to interpret JavaScript. At the same time, if you decide to render in React applying CSR by default, for the React server side rendering implementation, you will have to use additional tools to indicate metadata (for example, React Helmet).

As for performance, in the case of high-load projects, with the server side React rendering, this indicator will be better than with CSR since the SSR website or application will not be limited by the resources of the user device and browser. Also, the user device itself will be less loaded since its only task in the context of updating content will be its output (without rendering).

Conclusion

To sum up, we would like to emphasize that with the correct use of JavaScript frameworks for SSR, you can solve the problem of poor ranking of single-page applications (SPAs) as well as content-heavy websites where SEO and bootstrap performance are critical. On the other hand, CSR is suitable for software with dynamically updated content, that is, content that should change without completely refreshing the page.

However, you should not limit yourself to just these two rendering approaches. In particular, there are also hybrid rendering approaches that combine the best characteristics of SSR and CSR. For example, you can consider the static site generation (SSG) vs SSR couple – perhaps the first option will be the best choice for your project.

‍