Speak Your Users’ Minds

The user based testing always fascinates me as the product is analyzed from the perspective of living person rather than dead code or design. A user is one who uses the “Product” or “Services”, the one who makes a product HIT or FLOP.

In last few years, I have observed that businesses are seriously considering the products from user’s point of view. Did you also update the test cases for the last product you tested? Does your test plan include scenarios for user based testing? Do you think about “User Experience” while testing the product?

The User Experience Testing or UX Testing, as most of the time we call it, is conducted to find out how user feels after using the product. Does user feel great about the product and come back for it or was it last time s/he used this product? Here, the product is tested against the emotions of the user and that is what makes it most difficult kind of testing.

When I think of Happy User Experience, the first example which comes in my mind is of IPhone. There are multiple brands with hundreds of smart phones running on different platform but still a large chunk of young population want to buy IPhone; even after the higher cost. Good user experience guarantees the Quality and people are ready to pay higher if product makes them happy.

How do you feel about IRCTC website?

Are you eager to try alternative of IRCTC, if available? If answer is “Yes”, I guess I made my point.

There are five factors I realized during testing which directly affect the user experience.

 

Contextual: The product should be in context with the user requirement. If not, forget user will ever use the application.

Desirable: The need is over once product is contextual. Give user what he was wishing in the product. Little more than what was needed.

Usable: The product should be easy to use. Don’t make user to go and check for the manuals.

Accessible: The product is accessible to all users – abled and disabled.

Trustable: The user should have trust on what product does and what it conveys. Branding plays an important role in building the trust. Remember ‘I’ of HICUPPSF by Michael Bolton.

Customer is the King and King has broad spectrum of options. Now, it’s just not eBay only, there are Flipkart, Amazon, Tesco, SnapDeal and 50 other online retail and market places. Everybody is selling the same product then how one can differentiate itself from the herd. This is high time to include the user based testing in your test plan. You want to guarantee success of your product – Speak your users’ minds. Remember, the $300 million button.

How about using a Spell Checker?

Using a spell checker is a good habit. Use it occasionally :)

Secured Payee Account Number, Really?

This one was found in ICICI bank website while adding the new Payee. The Payee Account Number is masked for the first time but displayed in confirmation field.

The Orphan Error Message

This error message I used to see every time I started my system.

It took me a while to find out that this error message belongs to iMindMap application which I removed from my system. Don't you think they shall display the application name while displaying such errors?

PSR - The tool to write Effective Bug Report

How often as a tester do you think that you spend a big chunk of your testing time in reporting the defects rather than testing actually? There could be multiple reasons of this:

• The defect template could be complex
• You might be slow in typing
• You might not be so good in vocabulary

How many times did it happen that you logged a defect and developer rejected because the steps were not detailed enough to replicate the issue.

A good bug report is responsibility of the tester and each stakeholders expect the same. I noticed the same issue within my project; Team spend too much time on writing effective bug reports. On average it takes 30 minutes to log a defect. That is a big time. If one found 6 defects that means the person had spent around 3 hours to report those defect. That was something pinning me for last few months and I was eagerly looking for a solution to get over this problem.

Recently, I came to know about “Problem Steps Recorder” which caught my attention. Microsoft has provided this utility in Windows 7 to record the problem steps in Microsoft Window. PSR captures the events happening on the screen and create a low size zip file with all steps and screenshots happening at the desktop.

PSR also provides the facility to annotate the screenshot during the runtime. Just select the screen area and enter your comment. The same will be added in the Report. Isn’t it awesome?

You can even disable the screen capture as per your need.

This is kind of what I was exactly looking for. The next step was to know how team feels about it.

On a good day, I called my team for training and demonstrated this tool. They all were quite excited and wanted to use it immediately and there was no reason to stop them. So, I asked them to use the tool and let me know their opinion. Till now, I got very positive feedback about the tool so I am thinking to take it to next level; to get it approved from important stakeholders, mainly Project Manager and Customer. No matter how others’ take this, it has already become a mandatory part of my Test Armory.

If you practice testing, How about using it in your practice sessions? Please share your opinion in this thread.