Quality Management ROI Calculator - Focus on Test Automation
The Rational Quality Management ROI calculator is intended to give you an idea of what return you can garner from implementing our functional testing solutions. Our quality management solutions offer tools to develop a continuous process, powered by automation to govern software delivery.
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If your system picks up a problem on validation, you need to send
an error message back to the user and give them another chance to
fill in the form correctly.
Two big no-no's here. Never return the form to the user without a
full explanation of what's wrong, and, when it's returned, don't
clear form entries that were perfectly valid. If everybody could
abide by these two rules, the world would be a happier place.
Unfortunately, they're often broken.
If you have extensive validation you will need to put a lot of
thought into your error messages. You should finish up with
dozens of them for different circumstances. If you have only a
handful, it's a sign that you're not getting into enough detail.
There's a fine opportunity here to score points with your
customer by saving them time and explaining exactly why they're
an idiot, rather than just telling them they're an idiot and
letting them work out the reason themselves.
Which brings us to tone. Customers often complain that error
messages are too curt, forceful, or downright insulting. The
usual reason is that they've been cobbled together by a
programmer, while the company's customer relations expert sits
four doors away doing something else (maybe struggling with a
piece of software). Ideally, the same person who writes the
company's grovelling apologies for major foul-ups should be
brought in to edit programmers' attempts at error messages, which
will rarely hit the right tone.
Now let's take a look at usability and individual form elements.
Checkboxes
Can't go wrong with these, as long as the question you're asking
can only have a yes/no answer — which is why you don't see
them that often. Few questions are that simple.
Checkboxes can be grouped together under a single HTML control name. That's
fine, but don't mix this kind of list with mutually-exclusive radio button
lists or your visitor may become confused.
Radio buttons are a series of mutually-exclusive on/offs sharing the same
control name, and checkboxes can be single, or can be a series of on/offs of
a non-exclusive nature, sharing the same control name.
(
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#h-17.2.1).
Radio Buttons
A series of checkboxes with alternative answers to one question.
Again, this is straightforward as long as all possible answers
are covered. If you can't be sure, include an "other" option and
look at the stats to see if it gets ticked.
Radio buttons are suitable for presenting two or three options.
They can stretch to four and possibly five. There's a suitability
overlap with dropdown boxes, which are also great for presenting
a small numbers of options. Your choice of which to use may
depend on context. If you've got a sequence of regular
checkboxes, a few radio buttons would fit well with them, but if
you have a series of dropdown boxes, you might as well use
another dropdown box for a choice between a couple of options
rather than changing over to radio buttons for a single field.
Consistency helps usability, and it may be worth staying
consistent even if that means choosing a form element that isn't
the one you'd normally choose for that kind of field.
One thing to watch out for is radio buttons in an optional
section, shown without pre-selection. The classic trap is that
once the user has selected an option they can't reverse out to
show no selection. Instead, design the field with "no selection"
or "not applicable" as a button and make it the pre-selected
option.
Quality Management ROI Calculator - Focus on Test Automation
