g33klady shares an e-mail:
This looks to be a procedural error, probably made by some volunteer the first week on the job.
In other words, one of those admins your developers trust so well.
The people who bring you the latest St. Louis Honda e-mail show you how badly you can do an e-mail. I found it in my junk mail, for starters.
For seconds, they put the alt/title attribute for the header image to “Please enable graphics”:
I get what they’re trying to do. If you have images disabled, that text would display telling you to enable image display. Which is all well and good, but:
Even worse:
This is the sort of thing that gave me nightmares when I was in interactive marketing: minor e-mail glitches that occur only in certain browser/site combinations.
Take, for example, the latest Nintendo e-mail. When received in a Hotmail box and viewed in IE, it looks like this:
That’s how it’s supposed to look. However.
Scotts grass tries so hard with its Spring 2009 e-mail, but although it provides decent alt text for some images (Scotts Lawn Photo, Beautiful Lawn Photo, and so on), the filename displays for the product image:
For Petes’ sakes (all of the Petes, seriously), it takes 20 minutes to run a basic test of HTML marketing e-mails where you mouseover the text and check the links. But that 20 minutes takes away from the next emergency at the interactive agency.
This month’s AAA (American Automobile Association) e-mail uses the super-duper random ALT text generator:
Well, the image has everything you’d want in a stock road image for United States drivers:
There is, however, no diamond in the illustration.
A small point, to be sure, but, dammit, doesn’t anyone pay attention?
Don’t answer that; the truth makes it hard for me to get up in the morning.
PhilK, who sends me so much material he ought to start his own blog, encounters a problem with an e-mail.
This is from LogiGear, which is supposed to be some sort of newsletter about Strategic Software Testing:
If he clicks the Continue Reading link, apparently the rest of the article is less interesting:
LogiGear’s team has failed a vital step in the e-mail process: Testing e-mails sent to friendly accounts after the content has been pushed to production but before the e-mail drops go out. The e-mail drops are blasts of e-mails to subscribers sent in batches to spread the load over a couple of days.
If you’re going to do this the right way, you need to include e-mail addresses in various Web-based clients like Yahoo!, Hotmail, and gmail as well as accounts where you can open the mails in Outlook and Thunderbird to see how they look and that the links go to the right places on the production server with the proper tracking data on the querystring.
I mean, for Pete’s sake, even if the information wasn’t on the production server yet, you would probably see a standard 404 instead of a chiding e-mail from your mailing vendor.
Of course, this could entirely be a screw up on the part of the e-mail vendor, too, but a bit of testing would have uncovered that before PhilK got a chance to pass it on to the meanest software tester on the Web, ainna?
If you’re working at an interactive agency that does e-mail campaigns or even if you’re working on an application that sends e-mails, you’d better make sure you get to look at those e-mails before the public does.
Why?
Funny you should ask.
To keep something like this from showing up in my e-mail box:
Also, maybe one should have tested at the e-mail vendor to make sure that the links that were properly formed actually went somewhere:
As you can see, the problem occurs at the e-mail vendor site, not on the target Web site.
If QA had looked at this, they might have seen it.
Below the fold, another e-mail sending lesson. (more…)
As you know, or you should know, many e-mail clients will block images and links from incoming messages from unknown addresses. If you’re sending out an e-mail, perhaps you should keep that in mind when your organization designs an e-mail. Remember to include good alt/title text and try not to put every last bit of copy in an image, okay? Otherwise the beautiful, wonderful e-mail you designed to look like this:
Looks like this: (more…)
Bizjournals.com offers good advice with its latest e-mail’s subject line:
If I waited too long to adjust to my ma, I got a whuppin. Frequent whuppins led me to a career in QA, where one can abuse others and get paid for it.
Pizza Hut has more trouble with its new technologies as it blasts test e-mails to actual customers:
I didn’t get the e-mail myself; instead, one-time commenter The QA Slayer passed it on. I understand that the test e-mail offered 99 cent pizzas.
Remember, this is not the first time Pizza Hut’s interactive agency has rolled 1 on its hit roll (that’s a critical fumble to those of you too good to have played D&D).
Kohl’s is running another sweepstakes, and this one includes an object lesson about testing ancillary elements of your promotions.
The problem doesn’t lie with the form itself; you fill it out, and on the thank you for entering page it allows you to send a friend a link to the sweepstakes. That’s becoming pretty standard fare, and I didn’t get an error with the tell-a-friend form.
However.
A Men’s Wearhouse e-mail apparently indicates this image is important by giving the image an asterisk as its alt text:
As a reminder, if you don’t want to include alt text with an image, the proper and Section 508 compliant way to do so is with an empty alt attribute, not with random characters in it.
Sometimes, even well-intentioned designers and developers errantly use the old cut-and-paste trick to replicate existing things, such as table rows in layouts such as we see in this e-mail:
Sadly, though, even well-intentioned designers and developers are only designers and developers. In this case, no doubt the person cloned the first row in the table and used it as a microtemplate for all others in the table. Unfortunately, that person forgot to change the alt text for the Gifts image.
That’s why you have to test every thing, every time, QAsmonauts. Because this time it’s the alt text, but next time it could be the image filename (resulting in the wrong image or a broken image) or it could be the target of the link.
You have to hand it to the people responsible for the Disney Movie Rewards e-mails. They just try harder.
The basic e-mail has the normal, if you can’t see it, click to see it on the Web link:
And that view as Web page is wise enough to remove the View as Web page link (a pet peeve of mine, as you know: the “View as Web page” link on the actual Web page that the user views when viewing an e-mail as a Web page). The Disney interactive marketing team and its e-mail vendor go the extra mile, though, and put a special link on that Web page instead:
Awesome. I love it when they go that extra step. And fail:
A page entitled Marketer Error Page with nothing on it.
It could not be named more appropriately.
You know what The Director does when he’s running through the test e-mails, sometimes called “friendlies” because they’re sent to a list of known people for testing? He clicks every link in the e-mail. And you know what he does when he clicks the View as Web page link? He clicks every link on the Web page.
Often you’ll find that tracking information is missing or whatnot, but every once in again, you get the good stuff.
I should make a special category called Disney to collect all the pro bono work I’m doing for the company.
This confirmation e-mail rendered in text has one thing going for it: The composers knew that the trademark and the registered trademark symbols don’t render correctly, so they replaced those symbols with ™ and (r) respectively.
Too bad nobody thought about the smart apostrophe in Tony’s(r).
Remember, if you’re using Microsoft Word or other popular programs, the applications will replace straight quotes in the copy with smart quotes, and most people are not smart enough to know the difference. You, fellow QAer, must.
Dear e-mail campaign designer, please remember that smart quotation marks and smart apostrophes (as well as other special characters like em dashes) do not render properly in text only e-mails.
Ergo, say you’re putting together a tell-a-friend e-mail such as the one found on the Lost Sawyer’s Nickname Generator. You should probably take a little more care when copying the text from your word processor to make sure that you replace the apostrophe:
You could also do a little testing on it, too, but that’s probably too much to ask.
If they tried to look professional up in the dictionary the way they spelled it in the alt text, GMC wouldn’t find it:
You can guess what professional grade I give them for sloppy quality.
I get e-mails because I once signed up for KCStar.com so I could read an article there. I might have opted out once or twice before; I know I’ve tried to opt-out of the Twin Cities Star several times, but like a drunk-dialing ex, they keep ringing me up with ludicrous offers hundreds of miles from me.
So I tried to opt out of the e-mails via the latest offer from KCStar.com, an offer targeted to KU and MU (that’s University of Missouri-Columbia, not really an MU like my alma mater). Here’s the link in the e-mail:
If I were an e-mail marketer, I would almost be insulted:
I realize I single out BizJournals.com a lot, but geez, the quality of its e-mails and its Web site are atrocious and worthy of scorn.
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