QA Hates You

Sometimes your organization needs to tie into third party Web sites with corporate badging.  In these cases, you either provide them with a set of CSS files and whatnot that cover your site’s template.  In other cases, you just trust them to grab the things they need off the Web site.  And you let them grab.

However, it would behoove you to apply a little intelligence to the process instead of doing the equivalent of cut and paste.  Case in point: Amazon.com, which links to off-site press releases but does not pass logged-in state, leading to a misleading bit of imagery:

First, here is Amazon.com when you’re not logged in:

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Now, when you’re logged in, the top identifies that you’re logged in.  All over the place:

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But if you click through to the media releases, you’re taken from Amazon.com to the site of some PR or PR hosting firm:

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Amazon is not sharing credentials with this site, which is appropriate; however, note that at the top, the site indicates that the user is not logged into Amazon.com when this is not the case.  Showing incorrect things is bad.  Sometimes, I have to restate this in defense of defects.  Telling the user things which are not so is bad.

Corporate IR.net should have masked this messaging.  All other links and whatnot would have worked seamlessly, taking the user back to Amazon where he or she is logged in.  But the invitation to log in or sign up should have been suppressed.  You don’t need to pass the credentials, and you don’t have to fake a logged-in look.

Remember when you’re working across sites like this to look with a jaundiced eye to the places where the original template shows state that the copied site should not.

It’s called Debug the Flash/IE Integration!

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Let’s talk about energy efficiency.  It’s efficient not to put QA energy into a project and to push the costs and aggravations of errors onto the user.  That’s proven economics law to many organizations.

Unfortunately, the user will go elsewhere.  And children won’t learn how to save energy by hectoring their parents from EnergyHog.org.

Two weeks ago, an event occurred that altered the fundamental way we describe our locus within the space-time continuum.  That event, the New Year, means that any Web site to which you added content since then needs to have an updated copyright date:

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 If you’re working in PHP, such as a blog, here’s a PHP script to make it dynamic.

Another thing to check is for any recurring contests on your sites, such as stories that you ask users to share, to make certain that your terms, conditions, and rules extend to the new calendar year.

I know, as a Web developer, you automatically assume that your awesome Ajaxy Web-service lovin’ application is better than anything else ever devised in the history of mankind.  Ergo, it’s impossible that you would think that a user would use something outside of your browser to perform a function that you have specifically coded into your application with all the deft, loving care you could between 4:10 and 4:30am the morning the application was scheduled to go live.

I mean, a user who is accustomed to the CTRL+P keystroke to print something, what a backward rube!

Right, Bing?

Say, for example, you need a Bing map to the Cambridge Hyatt.

Here’s that map on the computer screen:

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Now, CTRL+P and:

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Gee, that’s handy of them to tell me in a bit of text that I wasn’t doing it right, but here’s a thought: you’re not doing it right.

You need to account for things the user can do to your site with the browser.  Even if it’s just a little text marring your beautiful screen layout that says, “To print, use the icon we provided because we suck.”

Bonus points to the person who can identify the other defect with the printed map.

That’s what I think of this state of the Tell a Friend form on this Taster’s Choice Flash wheel o’fun:

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As a reminder, your Flash applications do not sport the same basic usability behaviors that you get out of Web sites rendered in browsers or in applications built with robust development languages.

Instead, it’s going to let you expose all of your drop-down lists at the same time.  Which makes no sense, since the user can only act on one and the others clutter up the interface and obscure the text of the message.

It’s a lack of attention and a lack of QA.  Don’t let it happen to you.  Test the basic behavior of your Flash applications to make sure it conforms to what other applications do.

Another design bit that gets me: divs or ads that display open before I mouseover them.  Like this thing on the front page of Lowes.com:

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The Today’s Deals panel displays over the main Flash presentation when the page loads.  At first glance, it looks as though the layout is broken.  But it’s the design that’s faulty here.

If you’re not having luck getting people to expose the panel by mousing over it, maybe you should rethink it instead of just making a mess with it.

An Amazon.com blog passes through an exception from one of its subcontent providers:

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I’ll leave it to you to play QA Quincy, MD, and figure out why this is popping up in a JavaScript alert box.  Personally, I suspect it’s debug code in production.

If you watch North American, and by “North American” I mean “United States,” football, you might have noticed a new set of television commercials from Wonderful Pistachios that probably try to emulate the success in years’ past of Emerald Nuts.  Wonderful Pistachios has a Web site and everything, so its agency got some budget.  Which it apparently spent on the commercials and turned the Web site over to interns.

Let’s enumerate some of the problems.

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So say you turn off your pop-up blocker on the La-Z-Boy room designer and get to use its application.  Then, you lay out your perfectly complex room full of expensive furniture and want to save it.  First you need to register.  But when you click Save:

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All right, I get the point. You want me to go into the showroom.

So I did.  And then I bought from my homies at Ashley Furniture, based in Arcadia, Wisconsin, who has a manufacturing plant larger than Arcadia, Wisconsin, itself.  And whom I forgive for having content overrun their design on their About Us page’s Today div:

 
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I would ask again, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”, but I think I’ve proven the answer is, “Not really.”

Daddy’s Coming Home Alert:  Welcome to my new La-Z-Boy readers!

This blog post sounds like some of the storefronts I’ve QAed.  Before I got started on them.

I am trying to purchase a product called “Sothink SWF Quicker” from their online store. They have two ways to pay, and I preferred the one that allowed me to use my credit card.

In fact, they’re using the same payment system that RACS does, through Yahoo. But it’s loused up somehow; when I tried to connect to it, it hung forever. I used the HTTP sniffer in Proxomitron to see what was going on, and it was a series of SSL connection attempts that timed out and failed.

So I thought it might be a transient glitch. I tried it again an hour later; same thing. Next day; same thing. I sent them an email describing the problem. Couple of days after that, I tried it again; same thing. Also, no response from them.

Tonight I decided to try their other payment option: Paypal.

It seems like a no-brainer to put a business online these days.  Unfortunately, that’s just what a lot of online retailers invest in it, much to the chagrin of people who would be their customers but for their online shopping experience.

Funny how if you visit the La-Z-Boy Web site’s design center and try to launch its room planner, the page just seems to reload.

Well, it does if you’re using your browser with its default Block Pop-ups setting.  If you’re using Internet Explorer with the sound turned up, the little boo-plick sound and icon gives it away:

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Look, I get that sometimes you want to spawn an additional window to provide nifty little applets and whatnot.  However, you need to recognize that most people are going to use their browser’s default settings or turn the security and annoyance avoidance level up.

You’d better work around that or at the very least let the user know that he needs to allow pop-ups.  Because making it look like nothing is happening but the page reloading will frustrate your user, and let’s face it, the Slumberland.com Room Planner works.

Although the menus look like crap in Firefox, with the menus overlaying the menubar and displaying random pixels:

 
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Jeez, I go over there to make sure I can make a point about its room planner working, and I find a defect there, too.  Can’t anybody here play this game?

I don’t know what NorthernTool.com has against my children, but it’s denying access to a cool looking toy:

 
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I realize that’s not going to prevent me from ordering the toy.  What prevents me from ordering it is that it costs $200, and in the hands of two QAlings, it would soon be a pile of $35 parts on the living room floor.

I’ve noticed for some time that the advertisements that Hotmail serves up have leaked memory, impeded performance, and thrown normal JavaScript errors, but the one I got yesterday took the cake:

An error so egregious that Internet Explorer was dumbfounded.  Now that’s an error.

The Tell-a-Friend feature on the Dole Salad Super Slider contest offers a single field: friend’s e-mail address:

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This works because the screen displays after you’ve entered your e-mail address and name as part of your contest entry.  But what happens if you click Submit before you enter a friend’s e-mail address?

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The error message mentions a friend’s first name field which is not present on the form.

The application sends the message when you enter an e-mail address, so the friend’s first name field is not actually required.

I’ll leave it to your imagination whether this represents recycled code, a late-breaking design change, or an assumption on the part of developer.

What I can tell you is that someone did not test this application thoroughly.

Remember, each of these applications is its own entity, and if you’ve done the same thing a million times before for other clients, you need to treat each application as though the others did not come before them.  Your assumptions and oversights might be more glaring and showstopping than this simple problem.

If you’ve QAed any number of marketing e-mails, you’ve seen this problem before: someone uses another e-mail as a guide and just puts new text in over the body, leaving a number of fragments of the old e-mail behind.

Like this one from Information Week.

Here’s alt text left behind from the renewal e-mail from which they copied this referral e-mail:

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And this little bit of copy with a date and deadline for renewing and then the threat of a $200 subscription if you miss it:

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You know how you combat this?

• Create templates for e-mails instead of using a previous e-mail for a guide.
• You know, test the e-mail.

But these are best practices, not most practices.

When you sign into LinkedIn.com, note the things they got right with the redirection page:

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1. They have a relevant <title>.
2. The words are spelled correctly.

Never mind that, let’s talk about what’s wrong.  The image is sized incorrectly, and it might not be propagated across all servers since I sometimes get a broken image icon when I logged in.

Also note I did not test the click here button, so I cannot vouch for its working properly.

The little redirect pages appear in a large number of applications and Web sites, sometimes appearing only for a scant matter of milliseconds before the user is whisked away to paradise, or at least the content he sought.

That’s why these little pages are often overlooked in testing and, let’s be honest, in design and development.  Someone jams a bit of text and maybe a hyperlink up there and off it goes.  However, you ought to take a little look at it to make sure the words are spelled correctly and that the links are valid.  You can do this by:

• Having the developers build an interval in it so you get the opportunity to look it over when you test it.
• Taking a screen shot as it shows up to review the spelling and design placement at your leisure in a graphics application.
• Being really, really fast (my preferred method).

It’s in your Web site or application, so you’ve got to make sure they do it right.

The login form on the My Toyota Web site has a login form for the narrow-minded when viewed in IE:

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Enter a wide enough string, and the form pops over to the right and cannot pop back over to the left:

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You’d think they’d have looked at in in IE.  Well, you would if you weren’t a seasoned QA professional who expects that the designers and developers looked at it in their preferred cool browsers and didn’t care what it looked like to the hoi polloi who drives Toyotas and uses Internet Explorer.

Defunct St. Louis, Missouri, newspaper St. Louis Globe Democrat plans to resuscitate itself after 23 years as a Web-only endeavor.  Currently, the Web site only has a sign up page and promises news in December.

Meanwhile, the masthead of this two-page microsite links to a misspelled representation of the URL:

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I cannot wait to see the attention to detail and the quality control that they put into it when it launches.  It might even rival the real paper in town, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Web site.

Although I have to give credit where credit’s due: That is one elaborate alt attribute on the e-mail icon:

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That is one icon that is search engine optimized!

UPDATE: Well, curses.  I totally did squat on the mistyped domain, but someone over there was paying enough attention to fix the problems before any of you saw my Internet prank.  Which is why I should probably stick to QA and leave the pranks to the b3ta guys.

An article page from The New Scientist tells you that the article you’re looking for, Seven questions that keep physicists up at night, has moved and provides a link to the new page.  Or so you would think:

 
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Instead of going to a new page which would have the article, the link leads you to the current page.

Or as we QAicists call it, a link vortex.

CMLalley is apparently punishing her testing team by getting them a subscription to Quality Digest.  However, it wasn’t easy:

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You know, I suspect that a magazine entitled Quality Digest is managed by magazine professionals and its Web site is managed by Web professionals.  Sadly, neither of those groups include actual quality professionals.