Building an AI-powered daily reading habit app test project

Integrating Appium Inspector natively into Sauce Labs RDC to eliminate setup friction and let engineers start inspecting elements with a single click.

Overview

SDETs and QA engineers were losing up to 15 minutes every session just to set up Appium Inspector before they could inspect their native apps. The friction was manual, repetitive, and had become a reason customers cited for leaving. I led the design to embed Appium Inspector directly into live testing sessions, eliminating setup entirely, reducing test authoring time, and closing a gap competitors had been exploiting.

Role

UX designer

Team

1 UX designer, 1 PM, 2 developers

Timeline

Sep – Dec 2023 (16 weeks)

Context

Appium is the open-source framework teams use to automate mobile app testing. Appium Inspector is its companion desktop tool, built by the Appium Core Team, for inspecting UI elements during test authoring, but as a separate app, it has no connection to Sauce Labs’ live testing sessions.

Problem

Due to this constraint, inspecting a single element cost customers up to 25 minutes. 5–15 to configure a standalone tool, 10 more to locate it by hand. Every native app test or debug session started this way: leave the workflow, launch Appium Inspector, manually connect it to Sauce Labs’ device cloud, wait.
It was friction customers felt daily, and friction competitors had already solved. We were quietly losing customers to it.

Solution

The first enhancement we did was embedding Appium Inspector directly into Developer Options, so it shows up exactly where users already go to debug. With third-party tools, the biggest risk is that they feel like a context switch. Placing it alongside DevTools, Device Logs, and Network Capture made it a native debugging capability, matching users’ existing mental model.

We also introduced a hierarchy pane showing the UI element tree from the snapshot, so users could navigate and identify elements without clicking blindly through the inspect view. Selecting an element highlights it simultaneously in both the snapshot and the tree to make cross-reference much easier.

Challenges

One challenge to design through was making a ~25 seconds technical delay feel acceptable. Due to technical constraint, Appium attachment takes time. When a live session starts, inspection isn’t immediately possible. I designed a staged progress indicator that surfaced what was happening at each step, turning a blank wait into visible progress.