Navigating the Quirks: A Light-Hearted Look at Gmail's User Experience Blunders

I would like to dedicate this post to Santhosh Tuppad. It was Santhosh's post and the comments on the post which gave me idea to write this post. The post is going to heart break some Google fans but I think now they should accept that Google is also fallible.

Mission: To display the stupid mistakes to Google devotees in Gmail Registration form.
Time: 0.5 Hrs

How should I change the language here?

Scenario: I am a common user and I don’t have internet access at home so I go to cyber café to use the internet services. On such a public computer, I opened the GMail and found the following screen:

I don’t know Hindi so I am unable to read the content on the screen. How could I change the language to English?

Perhaps, Google forgot to provide the Change Language dropdown here.

GMail Help – Most Stupid Mistake

Scenario: I am using the GMail in Hindi and clicked on ‘Can’t access your account?’ link (Written in Hindi Translation) and redirected to following page:

 Somebody must tell Google that upper right side should be towards upper side of the page and not at bottom of the page.

Now I have doubt on Google’s direction sense. How could I believe on Google Earth now?

Where is the play captcha image?

I am wondering where the play captcha image for this captcha is.

 Play Captcha image: The wheelchair icon with captcha, on clicking you'll be presented with an interesting voice version of the captcha. This is generally used by physically disabled people.

Where is the Refresh button with Captcha image?

Scenario: I am unable to understand the letters in the captcha image. What should I do here?

Should I submit the incorrect word and try again for the new captcha, there is not guarantee that letters in new captcha will be readable

Or Should I refresh the page which will cause the lost of information that I already filled up.

Sorry, we are unable to present username suggestions at this time.

See the screenshot below:

There could be various reasons for this message:
1. GMail server might be busy with any female server :D
2. Its lunch time. :D
3. GMail server may be using the loo :D

Actually, GMail server suggests username on the basis of First name and Last Name entered by user and username can be in English Language only. Here, I have entered Hindi letters and he couldn’t process the request so instead of displaying its inability to suggest username, it has given this error message.

Incorrect Hindi Writing

Neither I had time to search them all nor do I have any spellchecker for Hindi Language so I have mentioned only one mistake in the screenshot. There might be more mistakes in Hindi Spellings.

 The word should be written as ऊपर and not उपर

Displaying Error message without wrong Input

When I clicked on Check availability button, it displayed me a captcha with a field to enter the characters in the captcha and an error message which says

“The characters you entered didn't match the word verification. Please try again.”

When I didn't enter any word then why they are saying that I have entered incorrect word. This message should appear if I enter the incorrect characters.

Relevant Information is not available on Time

I have filled up the password with the characters which are not allowed by GMail. It displayed me the following error after submitting the form:

The following characters are allowed in your password: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and common punctuation characters.

If password characters were not valid then why didn’t it displayed the error when I tabbed from the choose password field to next field i.e. re-enter password.

If it has displayed the error at right time I could save a lot of time.

I hope GMail server is not allergic to the user name which I have selected.

In the screenshot, see the distance between the field and error message. It seems that GMail server is allergic to the selected username and that’s why the error message going far away every time I click check availability button.

I am not sure but the reason might be: Whenever user clicks on ‘Check Availability’ button, it generates same error message. To avoid the duplication of error messages, the developer had hid the repeating error message.

The funny thing is when these kind of stupid mistakes are mentioned by any passionate tester who is doing it without any greed, few people got offended. According to them “No one will die and no two countries will go to war.” Believe me if we tester start to keep this point in mind, we don’t need UI / Look and feel testing then.

It took just 30 minutes to find the above issues and I am sure if any tester devotes his some time he can find more issues in Google products.

Trust the Google but with open eyes.

How popular websites irritate their clients?

To make a product successful, promotion of the product is always needed. Good Promotion of a bad product can also make the product successful. But sometimes bad promotion strategy can also irritate the users which ultimately puts negative impact on success of the product.

Recently I was checking my mails on yahoo.com when a green box started to appear on the top of the page. It was about access the Yahoo! Toolbar from more than one location.

First, I don't have Yahoo! Toolbar on my system, so this message should not display to me.

Also, I don’t want to install the Toolbar but there was no way to do so. There were only two options:

          • Either I add the toolbar with my Yahoo! ID

          • Or Save it to the computer

When I clicked the cross on the upper corner, the box is closed but appeared again after few second. I tried many times but the green box opens every time. Remember, last time when I wanted to install yahoo messenger on my system, it always failed :) and now when I don’t want to add the Toolbar, they were forcing me to add it.

Anyway I clicked on the ‘Learn more’ given in the box to learn how to close this box. See what I found:

Interestingly I was using Firefox and it was suggesting me how to get rid off from this box on Internet Explorer. What the purpose of user manual if user can’t find appropriate help?

At last, I decided to logout from my yahoo account rather than trying to close that irritating green box.

Any Comments?

Bulls and Cows

There is an old proverb - Necessity is the mother of invention. When a scientist invents something there is always a need. The Need is the final motive of any invention.

What is Need?
Need is a condition or situation in which something is required. In short need is requirement.

But what if the need is wrongly interpreted, Is the invention possible in that case? Might be possible but it would not be right invention; it would not actually do what we needed.

Now we change the above proverb according to IT Industries.

Requirement is the mother of every product.

Now what if requirement is wrongly interpreted, is the product possible in that case? Might be possible but it would not be right product because it would not do actually what stakeholders needed.

To provide a quality product to client, it is very important to understand the needs of the client. The purpose of testing can't be fulfilled if tester doesn't understand the requirement properly.

Why the requirement is mis-interpreted?
There may be various reasons such as:
• The clients/ users actually don’t know themselves what they really want or what they need?
• When it is impossible to know who yours users will be and it is quite often if we don’t consider the narrowly defined situation such as an EHR application.
• In general Requirements are not detailed enough to understand the exact needs of the stakeholders.

How the situation can be avoided?
The best solution is questioning. Questioning can be used as a tool to understand the exact requirement of a client. More you ask questions, more you clear about the product.

To depict the power of questioning and how it helps to understand the requirements of a client, we can take example of a game called “Bulls and Cows”

What is Bulls & Cows? - In childhood, you might play this game. This is also known as Cows and Bulls or Pigs and Bulls or Bulls and Cleots. This is a code breaking game played between two players.

How the Game is played? - On a sheet of paper, one player writes a 4-digit secret number. The digits must be all different. Then, the second player tries to guess this number. If the matching digits are on their right positions, they are "bulls", if on different positions, they are "cows". Example:

Secret number: 9374
Opponent's try: 4873 and asks “Is this correct?”
Answer: 1 bull and 2 cows. (The bull is "7"; the cows are "3" and "4".)

On the basis of answer, the opponent tries again until he finds the secret number. By asking a single Question again and again, Opponents finds the correct number.

When a single question can help to find a number then imagine how many questions you can ask in a requirements document. Asking Questions is a skill and it comes with lots of practice and time. But if you know the skill of questioning, there is no way to mis-interpret the requirements.

My Suggestion: If you find problems to understand the requirements then you should practice “Bulls & Cows”. If there is nobody to play with you, don't panic we have an open source version of “Bulls” and “Cows” called 4 digits.
The game's objective is to guess a four-digit number in 8 times using as less time as possible.

A Heuristic and A Puzzle

A Heuristic is a “rule of thumb", an educated guess, an intuitive judgment or simply common sense. A heuristic is a general way of solving a problem.
- Wikipedia

There are few heuristics which I generally use while doing testing. One of them is “To solve a big problem let it divide it into smaller ones”. I learned this heuristic in one of the workshop by Pradeep Sir.

Recently when I visited the Blog of James Sir, I found a puzzle challenge. The Puzzle was:

Find the missing 13th number in this sequence:
77, 341, 923, 1547, 608, 2116, 377, 2263, 518, 1394, 3182, 1645, _____, 944, 4636 …”

I always love to play with numbers and so I thought to find the 13th number in the series.

My approach: I noted down the series in WordPad and started to apply different arithmetic operators. Nothing found. I left the exercise (Hopeless!!!!)
Next day I have started again from scratch. As I already played with them so I knew simple arithmetic operation would not help me. Then what should I do? How to find the missing number?
I was just gazing the numbers like an idiot and expecting them to tell me what the pattern hiding in the series is. At this moment, suddenly an idea came to my mind: Apply the heuristic which I learnt in the workshop.

To solve a big problem let it divide it into smaller ones

I was not sure that it will solve the problem, but there might be some logic which could help me to solve the problem. So I started to use the heuristic and I hit the Bull's Eye. After applying the heuristic, I not only got the answer but also found the two patterns in the series. The pattern in the series was awesome which is difficult to find by simply applying the arithmetic operations or any formula.
I am not solving the puzzle here so that you can find the solution of the problem with your own and share your approach of solving the problem here.

P.S.: I am posting the solution in comments section for those who want the solution of the puzzle but I wish you to try yourself before looking the solution.