One of the biggest distractions for me while testing is ‘look and feel’ anomalies. For example, incorrect or inconsistent colouring of visual elements, spelling mistakes, missing images (icons/buttons etc), incorrect grammar, poorly formatted numbers, misaligned paragraphs and other text… The list goes on and on.
A lot of the time while testing I try to defocus from ‘look and feel’ stuff and concentrate on the functionality, the performance, the experience etc.. But I certainly don’t want to let that stuff slip through the cracks. I also don’t want to spend a lot of time manually checking each page of the app, remembering (or writing-down!) all the rules for ‘look and feel’ consistency.
If only I had an assistant, who would sit beside me while I tested and quietly acknowledge the visual problems, make a note of them and then continue to patiently watch as I tested. We would need to agree constitutes a “visual problem” and we would need to be flexible and change the rules for “visual problems” as the application changed and as we learnt about it.
So here’s my idea for a “browser watcher”, expressed as a user story:
As a website tester, I want to be able to specify some conditions for a website, or pages within a website. When activated, this feature (of the browser, or plugin, or whatever) will check for these conditions while I browse. Then, if any of the conditions are true, the browser should notify me (via an unobtrusive, but noticeable, popup/growl notification etc.) and log interesting details of the condition-match, for me to view later.
This seems to be an excuse to learn how to build a browser plugin. So that’s what I’ll do.
