Article summary
So, you’ve got all your automated tests passing and are feeling good. Have you thought about and tested the following five things?
Using the Back Button
Users can be indecisive, so when presented with an order screen, they might want to back out. Even if you post instructions about not using the back button, they might use it anyway. How does your app cope with that?
Refreshing the Page
Users can be impatient. If they have a slow internet connection or need to load a lot of data, they might get frustrated waiting for the page to fully load and hit the “Refresh” button hoping to hurry things up. Can your app handle it?
Bookmarks
Hopefully, your site is so useful that users bookmark it so that they can come back again and again. However, they may bookmark pages you were not expecting—not just the home page. How does your app cope with this? Does it gracefully return the user to the proper starting point?
Double Clicking
You have a button to submit the details on the page and go to the next screen, and it works fine. However, some users may have a trigger finger or an old mouse and end up clicking the button twice. What happens to your app in this case?
Timeouts
You want your app to be the sole focus for users because it’s so good, but realize that other things can interfere. Just as they are about to confirm their booking, they have to answer a phone call or talk to a friend. Thirty minutes later, they turn back to the screen–what happens?
These tests are quick and easy to do (well, not the timeout, but that’s a good one to start before you go off for lunch!), and you can easily try them out when performing other tests. For example, you might be testing the responsiveness or testing to see how things look in IE, so whilst you are doing that, give these a go.
Looking for more ways to test? Read some of the other posts in this series:
- 9 Situations to Test the Strength of Your Mobile App
- Learning from Fairy Tales
- Bugs Don’t Take Vacations
- Adding Software Tools to My Toolbelt
- Travel Bugs
- Testing Error Conditions
- Using Tea/Coffee Breaks in your Mobile Testing
- Alternating Phone Models Per Test Cycle
- Peripherals? I’d Forgotten about Those…
- A Tester’s Consistency Checklist
- “Alarming” Problems You Should be Preventing
- Quick Tests for Your Web App
- Testing for App Consistency
- Is it a Good Story?
- Quick Attacks on CRUD Apps
- Lights, Camera, Action, Bugs!
- Follow the Data