QA Hates You

Problems with ad serving software on WashingtonPost.com. Sometimes, on the home page, there’s a missing object:

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And even when the object is there, it has problems:

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I assume this is the ad server since the problem doesn’t happen on every page load and when it appears with the missing method argument, it leaves an empty spot marked Advertisement.

You should know by now, fellow QA, that when you have to integrate your company’s product with third party code, you do test that code out as thoroughly as your own company’s code, don’t you? Don’t leave that testing to the hands of your development staff, since they’ll be even less rigorous with it than they are with their own stuff. You have got to identify the gotchas so you can work around them and prevent them from spoiling your user’s experience.

The interior pages of the Web site for the City of Black Jack, Missouri (in reality, a small municipality well within the suburban borders of metropolitan St. Louis) has some problems with Firefox:

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If it was developed by government employees, they probably haven’t heard of Firefox yet.

It’s the little things that mean so much. For example, hop on over to the FedEx.com Spanish site. Review the Flash presentation and tell me what’s wrong with it.

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You know, ungentle reader, that I recommend you enter the longest possible string into any edit box (this is called the Hamlet test, yes?). That’s going to blow out the application where it allows too much information for the database to handle, but when you fill the string to its maximum, unbroken string or broken string, you’ll get a good glimpse as you run through the application of how wide data displays.

Kind of like ego-stroking titles render in the AJAX pop-ups on LinkedIn.com:

Remember to review how the data you put into the system displays when your application parrots it back to you.

Your 404 errors should never look like stack traces. If you’re using Apache Tomcat, like FoxBusiness.com, it might:

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Ensuring your Web server throws up an error page with relevant navigation and your logo on it would make this so much easier for the user, and it wouldn’t make it look like your Web site just crashed.

In another vein, you know, if I were in charge of QA for a heavily-trafficked, constantly updated site, I’d have more than one automated link checker running constantly on the pages. Sure, you get a performance hit as your spiders troll the sections, but you ought to have bandwidth to spare for it, and it would hopefully find broken crap before your users saw it. Or before many, anyway. Just one spider per section on constant rotation to make sure your links are as fresh as possible.

Of course, some intern is in charge of QA for most of these places, and by QA, I mean making photoQApies. Isn’t that how college students spell it these days?

Friends, I think we’ve moved enough from dumb terminal mainframe applications that most modern users do not expect the ENTER key to move them from one green- or amber-hued field to the next. Ergo, perhaps it’s time to establish, yea verily, a best practice for what the ENTER key should do in your application or form, especially when an edit box has focus.

Now we all know how it works when a radio button, checkbox, or button has focus: the ENTER key activates the button, toggles the checkbox, or sets the radio button. Okay, cool. But the whole ENTER key while in a text box thing seems to have a random number generator attached to it. I’ve seen the ENTER key do the following:

• Act as though the user clicked SUBMIT/SAVE or what have you.
• Act as though the user clicked the first button on the screen layout, which happened to be the CLEAR/RESET button (which the application set focus to on page load for some reason).
• Make the Internet browser trigger the DING! sound.
• In the case of the 2008 Subzero Dream Kitchen Sweepstakes, it identifies that data is missing if there’s no data in the field:

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I think we can agree that validating the presence of data in only the field with the focus is not what we wanted. If you have some data in the field in which you press ENTER, the form sounds the DING! for you without providing other messages.

In absence of any other prevailing reasons why not to make the application behave in a reasonable fashion*, how about we just have it so that, when the user presses ENTER, it’s just like he or she clicked SAVE/SUBMIT. Have a little sympathy for the unmousy amongst your users.

* Note to designers, project managers, developers: “Because I want it like that” or “Because it’s already like that” are not inherently reasonable answers.

When you’re designing a form (I’m using the general you, QA; I realize that designing is actually done by a 23 year old fresh out of college whose previous credits include a MySpace page and a Web log that ran for two weeks during the designer’s junior year of high school), you should put some consistency into your default values for your drop-down lists/combo boxes. Of course, since you (I mean the specific you, QA) have insights into best practices (at least those identified here), you should have something to say when the designer does something based on his or her whim.

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Here’s a slideshow on Wired featuring old stewardess photos. Want to see the uh oh?

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but come on, designers and developers, you do know that it’s very poor form–and it’s likely to be very abandoned form/promotion/application when your site relies on pop-up browser windows that the browsers themselves block.

I mention it again because the news flash hasn’t made its way around the Internet yet. In the last couple of days, I’ve found a couple of sites using Flash that try to open a new window from within the Flash, and in both cases Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 say nuh-uh, girlfriend.

The first is the home page for Graco Baby Products. The first time you visit it, and only the first time you visit it apparently, it displays a sweepstakes program of some sort:

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If you click that Enter Now button, you’re done. The pop-up is blocked and the page won’t display the link again the next time you reload the page. Which makes the odds better for the people who actually get to it, I guess.

Sorry, I don’t have a screenshot of the pop-up blocker notification since I can’t get the Flash overlay again. Also, I can’t get the swell JavaScript error that displays if you let the overlay automatically close via a timeout. But the point remains: if you’re going to use a plugin to elicit a pop-up window, you’d better make sure it works in spite of the browsers’ native pop-up blockers.

The Best Buy Hang with Hancock Better Summer Sweepstakes does the same thing. Here’s the page with the Flash-based Enter Today link:

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Click that link, and:

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Denied.

I told you guys once, I told you a thousand times about that pop-up blocker. Watch your AJAX, watch your plugins, and freaking test the thing before you send it to QA or put it live. But QA is a tell you once, tell you a thousand times sort of job.

Don’t you hate it when your slam glam new newspaper site redesign, now with its extra blinky ads crammed into it and 30 second home page load times on broadband connections, leaks its navigation all over the text?

If so, do not apply at StLToday.com.

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Because I don’t think they mind a bit over there.

Developers, in their spare time, sometimes like to share the wealth of their knowledge on Wikipedia.

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They have so many bugs to share.

When you complete an entry to the Hungry-Man Lucky 07 Sweepstakes, it offers you a chance to print a coupon:

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Let’s ignore the obvious JavaScript error. Click that Print Here, and here’s what you get:

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The coupon, and the rest of the page in solid black. Hewlett-Packard and all of the Cartridge Worlds/Walgreens in the world thank Launchpad for its efforts to stimulate the demand for toner and ink cartridges around the world.

You want to know how this sort of thing gets through? In most cases, coupon printing runs through a third party ActiveX widget or whatnot, so it’s not the agency’s problem when they go awry or it’s not the agency’s problem that the customer/user is printing a black field; that waste comes out of someone else’s pocket. There’s no responsibility in for the agency when their team can point fingers at third party integrations or whatnot.

However, it looks like this thing uses technology developed by Launchpad, so the problem is that the company just didn’t test it. Also, another problem is that you can print the coupon as many times as you want. Traditionally, programs of this nature are limited to a distinct number of coupons and somehow try to limit individual users or computers to a single coupon. If that’s a requirement here, Launchpad has failed miserably.

If you’re like me, you’re printing out hundred just in case Hungry-Man coupons become the money after the apocalypse.

Last week, I dinged ePrizes for a problem on the Caffeine promotional site. I had so much fun with it, I’d like to point out how they’ve bollixed the usability on the sweepstakes that the company is running with it.

To enter the contest, you need to register. On repeat visits, you sign in to enter again. Click the Login button at the bottom right corner of the screen. Here’s the sign in form:

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Bayer Animal Health is running the Advantage Stay & Play contest to give you and your animals valuable prizes. However, they’ve certainly allowed for it to look suspicious.

The actual contest is handled by ePrize, but I don’t think we can handle the entirety of the campaign upon them. Someone has created a landing page for the promotion located at http://72.47.221.110/:

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Revel in that for a moment, friends: The interactive agency couldn’t spring for a domain name or use a subdomain of an existing site. Instead, they rely on a raw IP address.

Geez, I hope users feel insecure enough when they see that. It’s the official page, as it’s related through the e-mails ePrize sends out when you fill out the form to which you’re redirected at http://bayer.promo.eprize.com/animalhealthcare/. I couldn’t find any inkling of this promotion on the Bayer Animal Health pages themselves, which is another indicator of the level of interactive agency we’re dealing with here.

Come on, kids, spring for a domain. Otherwise, you’ll look cheap to those who know and like a Romanian who wants your identity to those who don’t.

What we have here is a failure for [null] to log into the database:

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It’s less of a good idea to try and fail publicly in this manner, though.

(Link seen on Boots and Sabers.)

Jeez, when I’m comparison shopping the quality replica watches, best online pharmacies or honeys, or places to download executables purported to be OEM software, I base much of my purchasing decision on the quality of the e-mail marketing.

And leaving the subject of the message as a variable name probably won’t convince me.

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On the other hand, you know what I would be interested in, truly? Not quality replicas, but quality assurance replicants. I’d gladly hand over the company credit card for a couple of used Nexus 6 models.

So this Mylicon Pamper Your Baby sweepstakes form is obviously slapped together badly. Look at how the I accept the terms and conditions checkboxes is not marked as required and appears above the top of the form itself, including the legend indicating that the required fields are marked with an asterisk:

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Let’s leave aside the fact that the form displays below what looks to be an introductory page with a button labeled Let the Pampering Begin.  Let’s leave aside the obvious logical flaw in reconfirming your e-mail address when you haven’t confirmed it a first time.  No, let’s focus on what a user would do with the form.  Like fill out the fields marked as required and click Submit. What happens? The worst possible thing, of course.

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Okay, so I exaggerate. I have much worse things I can imagine than the application displays validation messages that you failed to fill out fields not marked as required, and the application uses some cookie-based system to actually hide many of the required fields that you didn’t fill out. But this is bad, regardless.  The user cannot correct his or her mistakes, and because the page uses cookies, the user cannot simply refresh the form to see all fields again.  The user must clear all cookies and then reload the form to reenter all data.  Assuming, by this time, the user wants to continue.

Pamper Your Baby? More like Make Your Users Cry Like A Baby.

On the plus side, these invaluable compromises made by the management staff trading off quality for expediency and profit probably allowed this project to come in on time and on budget, which in the interactive world tends to mean only a little late and only a little over budget.

ePrizes, LLC, the most experienced interactive agency in the whole universe and a QAHY Hall of Fame member shows its attention to detail and strict adherence with JavaScript best coding practices on its promotional site for Caffeine, its self-service offering that lets companies build their own online promotions with just as many bugs as professionally developed ones.

However, if you click the start button on any of its pages, it pops up the Flash-based program builder and throws up an Access Denied JavaScript error:

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Ah, well, you cannot access them all.

I told them once, I told them a thousand times (not them ePrizes, but the vast unenumerated they found in sweeping generalizations: If you’re going to sell your professional services as an Internet something, make sure your own Web site works right. It’s like when I reviewed resumes for quality positions. One spelling or grammar mistake on the resume or the cover letter, and I threw it out.

The crocs Next Step Campus Tour sweepstakes offers a chance for a daily entry into a sweepstakes. Amusingly, the submission success page includes a prominent link to submitting a daily entry:

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It’s amusing, because you get only one entry per day, so if you click that prominent image-based link, you get a warning message. Complete, of course, with a link to perform the same operation that you just failed:

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You know, it’s probably not a good design to limit user frustration if you constantly encourage user to do something they cannot and then taunting them for trying. This is the Lucy Holds The Football school of Internet design, and it’s about as funny as Peanuts in the 21st century.

Perhaps too much focus on negative testing explains this thank you page for the MicroCotton Fill Your Closet with Luxury Towels contest success page:

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On the other hand, given that the “word count” field actually only counts spaces, producing a potentially flawed word count and allowing the application to accept only a space as input, perhaps the company didn’t test at all.

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Geez. Don’t try to do too much, fellows, if you’re not going to do it right.