QA Hates You

Charles Hill finds an encouraging banner “ad.”

Charles Hill, he has the eye for QA if not the lack of heart.

Kudos to ComputerWorld for the ability to lay banner ads over the top of other banner ads:

Click for full size

You’ll note that I have rolled over the expensive PointRollish IBM banner; however, the Postini sub banner ad continues to scroll over it.

Brilliant!

I’d tell you what the Postini thing is all about, but the link in the little Flash doohickey doesn’t seem to resolve.

What should you do if your banner ad or banner ad delivery software requires Adobe Flash Player 9.0 and the user only has Adobe Flash Player 7.0 installed?

Not this:

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A civilian spots and mocks an Adobe banner ad.

A civilian, mind you, not a professional who needs to continually find problems for sustenance.

Keep that in mind when someone tells you that “only QA notices.”

The following banner ad, probably a PointRoll ad or some such, left detritus on the screen when its animation played and did not close when the user moused out:

Click for full sizeFriends, that does not build good brand equity or what have you.

But, Director, what are you supposed to do? Test the banner ads? Perish the thought! With the new technologies and dependence upon browser plugins, you need to test them. I’ve done it, and so can you. So could your damn hipster designers if they weren’t so caught up talking about what they saw at Burning Man.

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When do you make the same sort of control do different things? In two situations:

1. You’re lazy.
2. When you want to trick someone into exposing a banner ad and blaring audio at them.

For an example of this, let’s look at this IBM banner ad I saw on ComputerWorld.com:

See that little Open link with the X on it. You’ve seen similar control types even on banner ads, mostly with the X Close thing to shut those BadBoys up, right? So one would assume that this banner ad requires a click to open it and expose its content.

Ha ha! Fool! This merely requires a roll-over to expose it and start its audio come-on blaring. Given that, at ComputerWorld.com, it sits in the right sidebar between the scrollbar and the content, the odds of the user inadvertently mousing over it are pretty high indeed.

When it’s open, look what we have:

Click for full size

Does the banner ad close on mouseout? Oh, but no; now, you do have to close the button to shut it down.

The two similar-looking controls behave differently, and not only that, but they behave differently in the fashion that will prove most annoying to the disinterested user.