* Plea to all Web applications publishers and developers: Please, please, please check that your product works properly!
I have what seems to be a permanent headache. I have been looking at an incredible range and number of Web applications in the last few weeks, and in this newsletter I’d like to make a plea to all Web applications publishers and developers: Please, please, please check that your product works properly!
If I had a nickel for every time I find a dumb mistake in a Web application I would be insanely wealthy and I wouldn’t have a headache. The problem is that most of these mistakes aren’t hard to find.
I’m not thinking about misspellings (as egregious and unforgivable as these are), no I’m thinking about functional problems that just shouldn’t be there. Let me give you an example …
A few days ago I was out and about and a Verizon maintenance truck went past and on its side was an advertisement for Verizon’s FIOS service. Network World’s editor-in-chief has FIOS and he has frequently taunted me with the bandwidth he gets compared to what I get with my comparatively second rate AT&T DSL service. I haven’t seen FIOS ads in my town before so I became hopeful that service might now be available in my area, when I got home I went to Verizon’s FIOS site.
On the home page Verizon offers to look up service availability using your Verizon phone number and provides a link to an address look up page if you aren’t already a customer.
Now my address is a little odd as it was only assigned in 2000 (for historical reasons our original address was a quarter mile away, but I finally got tired of schlepping down the road to get my snail mail every day). So I was ready for a problem when I first tried to get the site to look the address up.
The first thing that strikes you about the lookup form is that right up front they aren’t making it easy. They have separate fields for Street#, Directionality (N, S, E, etc.), Street, Apt/Suite, Unit, City, State, and ZIP (why is it that most sites don’t just ask for street and ZIP – looking up city and state from ZIP is about as easy as it gets!).
What is hard to understand is why Verizon would ever opt for anything but the easiest to use interface. Google and scores of other sites can parse one line addresses with consummate ease so why does Verizon have to have so many fields to achieve the same ends?
Now my address is something like “1234 East Something Street” (forgive me being cagey but I’m sure you understand) and when I tried to submit that using the Verizon form, no matter how I entered the data, my address wasn’t recognized.
After my first few tries (the point at which most people give up), I got curious as to whether there was some magical combination that would work, but absolutely nothing was acceptable. Verizon even had a page of eight or so tips to help you enter addresses!
I say had because I started writing this newsletter a few days ago and got sidetracked, and when I returned to it and went back to the Verizon FIOS site I found they had finally fixed the problem (it also turns out that FIOS isn’t available in my area. Damn.).
So even though the site now works the fact that Verizon’s Web wonks could put up a faulty Web application is amazing! Here’s what you need to do not to fall into the same quagmire that Verizon was in:
1. Before you deploy a Web application have it tested internally. Get the department managers to walk through the interface, not the engineers – the engineers can hardly be objective!
2. Have non-technical close friends try it out. Ask them if the application feels logical.
3. When you deploy the Web application, test again! Things break between internal testing and deployment so make sure again that everything does what it is supposed to.
4. Make sure you know whether users are successful or not in their use of the Web application. Many Web application publishers just look at the positive usage data, but the degree of your success will be defined and limited by the negative stuff – stuff like page not found problems or, as in my case, multiple address not recognized failures.
It really isn’t hard to get it right – you just need to pay attention to the details and care about whether things work right. So, please all you Web application developers, follow these simple steps and let me skip the headaches.
