Showing posts with label web app testing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web app testing. Show all posts

Thursday, June 10, 2010

IE8 Close Dialog Usability Fail

I am willing to admit that it could just be me but I am going to put this out there anyway. I don't like the close dialog in IE8.


I don't think it is designed very well. Where is the "Whoops I didn't actually want to close anything!" option? It's there it is just not immediately obvious even to someone that spends way too much time in web browsers everyday.
It is the "X" in the top right corner. I know it is consistent with how you close windows across the board. But how do you know if you click on it whether it'll close that dialog box or randomly choose one of the two options displayed with the dialog buttons.
Seriously how hard would it have been to put a "Cancel" button or a "Don't Close Anything" button.

I'll crawl back under my rock now.

Friday, April 9, 2010

The Curses of the Web App Tester

sigh


If there are other are web testers out there they can probably feel my pain. Since I started in the roll 6 months ago I've lost count of the times I've gone to other websites and been greeted with errors like below. This one is from this very blog.



Now I know the first thing you're thinking is, why are you using IE8. Well that's because I have to for the product that I test. That and I was struck by the need to check out the blog in other browsers, you know to see if there was anything funky going on. This is probably the first curse of the Web App Tester.

The second is that debugging is always cranked up to the max, thus at least half of the pages that you view spew forth errors like the one here.

The third would have to be the wrong browser curse, you know, you're looking at a site and it doesn't work properly, some widget is missing didgets or its just downright manked. So you are forced to cycle through all your browsers till you find one that the site works properly on. Following this, the next time you go to the site, you will of course not remember any of this and go through the whole cycle again.

I do a few things to avoid these curses, all of my non-testing browsing is in Chrome, which for the most part works pretty well, except for booking flights (Virgin pay with Poli I'm looking at you) and internet banking (Ubank your interest rate is great, your website isn't) the main reason for this success is that as I test corporate website software I don't need to test in Chrome (although I still do a bit) and so I don't catch the stupid JS errors that abound through out the land.