QA Hates You

Newspapers and whatnot seem to love their auto-refreshing pages these days just so they can get additional pageviews in and rotate ads. However, I end up opening a bunch of articles in new tabs, and the auto-refresh feature chokes the machine’s resources. If I or the offending newspaper site loses connectivity, the pages refresh themselves into “Cannot load page” messages.

Or sometimes a helpful message that my Web browser cannot handle it:

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I’m running the latest Firefox. The problem lies on your end, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And if you hadn’t insisted on the refresh, we would not have had it at all.

When you’re building a Web site or application, do you check your pages’ meta content?

Neither do the people behind the MyFox channels’ Web sites like MyFoxPhilly or MyFoxNY:

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Remember, those meta things show up a lot of places. People see it in search results, social networking site summaries, RSS, and so on. If you’re misspelling something or dumping a null in it, that’s gonna leave its mark.

Would it hurt you to view source now and then? I think not.

Hotmail displays a bit of helpful troubleshooting information:

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I guess that would be helpful if I wanted to know which machine to remote into and up the timeout or rebalance the load balancer. However, for a user, this isn’t very helpful at all.

I was trying to use the online interface for one of my credit cards and wasn’t doing anything too naughty, I thought, when I got the Java Null Pointer Exception:

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I only use this application once in a great while (this was my second try with it), and I only spent a couple minutes with it as a user, not as a tester. Yet, here it is, an asplosion.

Am I just talented, or does the world of applications just suck that badly?

Whenever I’m planning or estimating for a financial application of any sort, I always plan for weeks of testing. Then, I don’t get called back. No doubt development shops the world over can find lower bidders (or none at all!)

And here you go.

Bug Forces Google To Drop Homepage Art:

Due to a bug, Google on Thursday cut short plans to have rotating artwork on the search engine’s normally stark homepage for 24 hours.

Starting at just after midnight Eastern time, Google traded its usual white background for rotating photographs of the works of Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma, Tord Boontje, and others.

The idea was to promote a personalization feature launched last week that let users choose their own background from photos on their computer, stored on Google’s Picasa photo service, or from a free Picasa photo gallery set up by Google.

However, after less than 14 hours, Google decided to go back to its traditional homepage because of a “bug,” Marissa Mayer, VP of search product and user experience at Google, said on Twitter.

As Joe always says, maybe they should have test more.

I have an old timey cellular phone. It’s not in a bag, but it doesn’t have a camera, Web browsing capability, or the ability to receive pictures.

Which means when someone sends me a picture, I get a message that I should go to a computer and follow the instructions to see my pix or my flix:

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All right, I got to a computer and enter that URL, all prepared to follow instructions and, frankly, fearing what picture might await:

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And I press ENTER to find:

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Great. They changed the Web site, but not the automated text message.

It’s a lot to keep in mind, every reference to every URL your site has used. Instead of keeping track that way, wouldn’t it be easier to just use redirects in this case? That way, your non-iPhone using customers (which would be all of them, hey, Verizon?) can still use your system.

After 30 minutes on the phone with tech support, I could navigate through the busy and slow Verizon Web site to find a picture of….. lilies. Lilies I planted at my former and yet unsold home in St. Louis, Missouri. The lilies are doing very well. Better than Verizon’s Web site.

You know, if your feature isn’t going to work right, maybe you shouldn’t use it at all.

Case in point: I received an online computer form, as in a real form and not an Internet form, from my real estate agent because apparently my real estate agent thinks this is a better idea than e-mailing me a PDF. At any rate, if you view the site in IE, it looks like this:

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No problem, right? Ossum! Now try it in Firefox, and by “try it,” I mean look in it in Firefox by default because you’re in the tech world and don’t use IE as a browser except to test. Now:

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Hey, it’s our old friend NaN.

Do you suppose this application is peeing all over itself because I’m have professional Adobe Acrobat installed on my machine or because it just sux?

Either way, that makes an interesting test case for auto-detection of plugins: What if the user has the professionals’ version installed? What, you don’t think a professional would dare visit your site?

As some of you know and a few of you ignore (I’m talking about you, Joe, and you poor misguided Minnesotans), the Green Bay Packers are the best football team in the entire universe (that’s North American football, gentle European and Asian readers).

However, the team’s Web site has a new contest on it with a couple of problems.

For starters, who designs a form where the middle initial comes after the last name?

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I suppose one could make a case for putting the required fields together, but I doubt anyone put any sort of case together at all.

Additionally, if you press ENTER in IE, the browser makes a bang sound at you. If you press ENTER in Firefox, you get this helpful message:

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It looks as though no fields are required. So what’s the problem?

I bet they got it up on time and on budget, almost, anyway.

An blog entry on Fox Business:

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The URL now leads to an actual page not found, but for a brief period of time it led to content wrapped in the page not found title.

I’ll leave it to you, gentle reader, to guess why this is. Temporary pages plugging the weekly show? Wonky CMS? Having the content put on the Web by an admin intern?

It’s probably too late to grab a lot of my British readership with that inflammatory title this morning, but I’m just trying to help this poor Web site with its vocabuary:

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The Web site uses a quizzing widget that I’ve never seen before and probably ran into a little trouble with a surge in load from a link from a popular Web log. When I first tried to load the page, it showed a lot of broken images and a loading icon; eventually, when I wandered back to the window, it displayed this error message.

Someone didn’t load test before launching. By “someone,” I mean “most Web companies.”

How could Warner Brothers and its interactive proxies not think that the Flash game described here would cause a problem?

The link is keepherawake.com, and it takes you to a website, where you will find an attractive, young blond waiting for you to keep her awake. How’re you going to do that? She keeps yawning. She’s sooo sleepy.

It’s going to be a long night, so you start with something light. You click an icon and her alarm clock rings. You make her jump up and down on her bed in her underpants. You get her to read a book. But that’s no fun, right? Maybe you’re a little bored.

You put her in the shower, naked, natch, where the camera wanders across her body. You make her do jumping jacks and watch her boobs bounce in that very tight T-shirt she’s wearing. Still, there’s something missing. Isn’t there something else you can do? Something, say, more … fun?

You decide to apply more aggressive methods. You click the switchblade icon, and she picks up a knife. As you watch, she cuts herself in the side with it, gasping. Hm, not bad, you think. You try another. You click the icon that looks like a lighter, and she picks it up. You look on while she burns her arm, trembling in agony. If you’d known torture was this easy, well …

Unfortunately, now you’ve run out of tricks, and it seems your options are more limited than 18 U.S.C. § 2340. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Slowly, she falls asleep. Suffice to say, in the end, she dies. Too bad all your torturing couldn’t, er, save her.

Don’t worry! It’s not all for naught. You can kill her all over again, or, better yet, show off your torturing expertise by posting how effective your torture session was on your Facebook page. And they said social networking was good for nothing.

Holy cannoli. There’s edgy, and then there’s offensive. No doubt this interactive team lacked a certain presence, say QA, who was willing to say, “Hey, this might go too far.”

Interactive agencies are filled with the intertwees who lack any perspective on how this sort of thing will play outside their hip and self-referential little societies. A good quality quality assurance team needs to be there to say, “Whoa.”

Rest assured, QA, I’m not saying you have to have anything but poor taste personally; however, you need to have perspective enough to pretend otherwise for the sake of the decent people traveling the Internet.

(Link seen on Instapundit.com.)

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!