Please WEB designers actually TEST your stuff with USERS first

jimbo45 · 13 Jan 2011

Hi there

am I alone in thinking that whatever the techncal advances in Programming (OO / Web / etc etc) the people who often implement this stuff NEVER seem to test it with "Bog standard" non technical users.

Apart from the usual sort of stuff for example "ERROR 99974' which is about as useful to a non computer guy as a frozen pie at the North Pole I'm always horrified at the sheer unnagivability of typical sites -- often from quite large companies.

The thing that really gets my goat also are these sites that say "Your Password has expired -- please re_logon again to create a new password" and then of course you CAN'T logon because "your password has expired".

I'm sure the technical competance of the web designers is fine -- it just seems to me that they actually have NO IDEA of how to test their developments with REAL users.

I've often seen poor application testing in the past but Web apps seem to be put into production absolutely RIDDLED with the most BASIC of errors that surely ANYBODY could test even on a stand alone PC.

I couldn't logon to work today (large corporation) for a similar reason -- Password expired -- please email service desk to reset --- but you've guessed it -- couldn't access the email system.

Cheers
jimbo

Prisoner · 13 Jan 2011

Well that's gotta feel bad.

When I make my sites, I always have my girlfriend and some of my other friends help me test them. She's got a bit of computer literacy from me, but my friends are the absolute antithesis of a web-savvy person. They also all use a different variety of web browsers, which is a plus.

I try to make my sites as user-friendly as possible, but there's a quote floating around... something about a war between programmers and end users, where the end users are winning.