Why You Don’t Skimp on QA
Marty February 6th, 2007
Wow, Wal-Mart really screwed the pooch on this one. If you visit their new Video Download beta site, you get a somewhat nice experience - not great, but not too bad - provided you are using Internet Explorer:
If, however, you are using a modern browser such as say, Firefox, your experience is somewhat … shall we say, different?
Notice anything wrong? Obviously, no one mentioned that over 10% of the country uses Firefox, including what might be a disproportionate number of the users who might use a download service like this. Of course, we are talking about Wal-Mart customers…
I sure hope that someone loses their job over this - this is sloppy and a REALLY poor example of what happens when you don’t do proper QA (or use qualified designers). I could go to town on the code itself, but could I really do worse than what they already show here?
- Design , IA , Programming , Tech [ ]
hahaha…idiots. I’ll have to open it up in Opera and Safari on da Mac and see how bad it looks there!
I tested with Opera, and it actually works. It’s just Firefox that is chocking on all of that IE-specific .jsp goodness.
Wow, usually things don’t break *that* catastrophically across browsers. I’m actually impressed with their incompetence.
Unfortunately, the reality is that a large number of Web designers/developers only test on IE — including a coworker of mine. He has started testing on Firefox now, but he really has no idea how to implement things in a cross-browser/platform way. I use Firefox as my primary browser, and you can bet my code gets tested on everything I have access to — but my programming experience has all been with that in mind. It’s almost a cultural thing.
I like the way you call Firefox “modern,” meaning IE must be … well, something else.
Michael - the ‘modern’ thing is something I picked up from other usability zealots, usually as a way to differentiate from IE5.x and 6.
As for cross-testing, I’ve found that BrowserCam offers a great service to see how your sites work in other browsers, although it can be kind of expensive for the freelancer ($40/month), especially if you aren’t doing a lot of new sites.
As for the Wal-Mart thing, I too was amazed at how bad it broke, particularly when it worked fairly well in Opera.