Hexagon Delivers Pixel-Perfect User Experiences by Integrating AI-Powered BrowserStack Percy

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Introduction

Hexagon is the global leader in measurement technologies, providing the confidence vital industries rely on to build, navigate, and innovate. From microns to Mars, Hexagon’s solutions ensure productivity, quality, safety, and sustainability in everything from manufacturing and construction to mining and autonomous systems.

As a company defined by precision and reliability, Hexagon recognized that its digital presence had to meet the same high standards as its physical products. This meant moving beyond the traditional notion of “functionally correct” and embracing a new standard of visual perfection. The digital landscape has evolved from simple websites to complex, responsive UIs across countless devices. With users forming opinions about a website in as little as 0.05 seconds, a modern application that looks broken—even if it works perfectly—is a failure. This case study details how Hexagon partnered with BrowserStack to ensure every digital interaction is as flawless as the technology it represents.

The Challenge

Why ‘Functionally Correct’ Was No Longer Good Enough

Hexagon, known for its technology solutions that deliver precision, accuracy, and reliability to customers, recognized the need for its digital landscape to meet the same high standards. As Vindhya explains, user expectations have evolved dramatically. “In the past,functional testing was enough,” she notes, but the landscape has shifted from simple websites on a few browsers to complex, responsive UIs on a multitude of devices. A modern application that functions perfectly but looks broken fails in the user’s eyes.

Statistics support this urgency: a user forms an opinion about a website in just 0.05 seconds, and 88% of users are less likely to return after a single bad experience. Hexagon recognized that traditional, logic-based automated tests were blind to critical visual issues, such as:

  • Misaligned elements and broken layouts across different viewports.
  • Font and color inconsistencies between devices.
  • Unexpected UI shifts caused by dynamic content or CSS changes.
  • The high volume of false positives from traditional pixel-by-pixel comparisons, which created noise and slowed down review cycles.

Hexagon needed a new standard for quality—one where visual correctness was treated with the same importance as functional correctness. “Our goal is to eliminate misaligned elements and broken layouts entirely,” Vindhya states, emphasizing the importance of a flawless user experience.

Percy’s root cause analysis is one of my favorite features. It makes it easy for testers and developers to understand where things have gone wrong… it allows developers to focus on the exact fixes instead of just finding out where the issue is.
Vindhya Perepa Associate Executive Manager at Hexagon
The solution

From Guesswork to Precision with Percy’s AI-Driven Vision

After evaluating the market, Vindhya’s team chose BrowserStack Percy for its powerful AI capabilities, ease of integration, and developer-friendly features. “I started looking for a lot of tools and then I ended up selecting Percy,” Vindhya recalls. The decision was driven by several key factors:

  • Low Barrier to Entry: Percy’s free tier, offering 5,000 free snapshots per month, allowed the team to thoroughly test and validate the tool’s capabilities within their project before committing.
  • Real Device Testing: The confidence that all tests run on real devices, not emulators, ensured that the visual feedback was accurate and trustworthy.
  • Seamless Integration: Percy’s ability to plug directly into their existing functional testing frameworks and CI/CD pipelines made adoption smooth and scalable.

Hexagon integrated Percy into their development lifecycle, empowering them to shift visual testing left. By capturing and comparing snapshots at every commit, Percy’s AI engine automatically flagged meaningful visual changes.

Vindhya highlighted several of Percy’s AI features as game-changers:

  1. AI-Driven Comparisons: Percy’s Visual AI goes beyond simple pixel-to-pixel checks. It understands the DOM and visual intent, just like a human reviewer, drastically reducing false positives from minor pixel shifts or dynamic content. “It smartly identifies the visual differences,” Vindhya notes.
  2. Root Cause Analysis: Vindhya calls this her “favorite feature.” Percy pinpoints the exact source of a visual change—whether it’s a content change, CSS style issue, or an attribute modification. This eliminates guesswork and allows developers to “quickly focus on what exactly is the issue,” fostering faster debugging and collaboration between testers and developers.
  3. Layout Shift Detection: For experience-driven websites, layout is everything. Percy is intelligent enough to ignore content changes while catching critical layout shifts, such as a misaligned button or a responsive breakage, that directly impact the user flow.

 

AI-powered visual testing isn’t just a trend; it’s the future of QA. It makes testing faster, more accurate, and more scalable than ever before. With BrowserStack Percy, Hexagon is not just shipping functional code; they are delivering visually flawless digital experiences with confidence.
Vindhya Perepa Associate Executive Manager at Hexagon
The impact

Faster Feedback, Focused Developers, and Flawless Releases

By embedding Percy into their QA process, Hexagon transformed its approach to UI quality. The benefits were immediate and significant.

  • Dramatically Reduced False Positives: Percy’s AI intelligently distinguished between meaningful regressions and acceptable visual differences, allowing reviewers to stop sifting through noise and focus only on what mattered.
  • Accelerated Debugging and Feedback Loops: With Root Cause Analysis, the time from bug detection to resolution was significantly shortened. Developers received precise, actionable feedback, enabling faster fixes and quicker CI/CD cycles.
  • Increased Test Coverage with Confidence: AI made it feasible to run comprehensive visual tests across numerous browsers, devices, and screen sizes for every build, ensuring a consistent and pixel-perfect experience for all users.

Hexagon successfully established a culture where visual perfection is a core part of the development process. As Vindhya puts it, Percy brings “clarity, confidence, and control to the UI testing process.”

Integrating BrowserStack Percy into our workflows has completely changed the game for us. Its AI-driven capabilities allow us to identify enable quicker detection and resolution of visual regressions, improving accuracy during each release. It’s been a transformative shift, and I am proud of our teams for embracing this new approach to quality assurance.
George Chang Senior Director, Digital Experience & Technology at Hexagon

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