Hootsuite Scheduled Posts Fails When urls include /@

When adding Tweet via Hootsuite schedule posts the Tweet was schedule without the url. I was trying to add a Medium url (Twitter also used to have /@ in some urls). I guessed the @ symbol was likely the cause of the failure. I did just tiny bit of experimenting and it seems as though Hootsuite removes the link if /@ are included in that order (but more experimenting - or looking at the code used by Hootsuite should be done - I spent less than a minute on it).

Given how popular Medium is I am amazed Hootsuite allows this problem to slip through software testing and use. Maybe Medium recently switched the url or Hootsuite just pushed some new code that broke it.

Luckily you can just remove the @ from the url and then it works (Medium just redirects to the url with the @ in front of the username).

But this is a lame error by Hootsuite. I would imagine it will be fixed quickly - so this post won't make sense anymore (but occasionally big sites fail to do obvious stuff - for example Google still fails to use human readable urls or have even mildly acceptable help).

Related: Coping With Bad Web Page Layouts - Use Urls Not "Click x, Then Click y, Then Click z" Instructions - Bad iTunes Ux and How to Submit a Podcast to iTunes - Poor Web Site User Experience (Ux)

Getting Around Bad Web Page Layouts

The page layouts of some sites seem to be designed by people only viewing sites on huge monitors. Google also seems to test some of their stuff only with super fast and super low latency connections. It isn't so surprising companies that don't have much customer focus just do what looks good in their office (which often isn't what the customer experiences).

Zillow and Trulia offer real estate information and provide maps. Unfortunately they don't bother to design the page layouts for the needs of people without huge monitors. For example, Zillow has 20% of the top of my screen used and then 50% of the right of the screen taken so you have this pretty small window for the content I want to see - the map.

I super easy design that would be done if customer focus was a concern is just allow the right column to be closed by users that don't want that waster their screen. But Zillow doesn't do that.

Given this I found another way to get back your view even if the page is designed to prevent it. Make the browser window very large (much more than your screen). Have the useless right column that you don't have any use for moved off the screen. This is obviously awkward but it works.

Sadly they then center the content for specific housing result so you have a huge amount of white space on the left and the page results scroll off the screen on the right. If they just didn't center it, things would be fine. If you right-click open the link in a new window it works (because the window opens as a normal sized window instead of the super large window created to cope with the badly designed web page).

These are the kind of solutions that only make sense for badly designed sites that are worth your time working around their bad designs. Most of the time I just abandoned such sites. But in those rare cases I actually find the site worth dealing with even with the poor design choices you can sometimes find work arounds in case you are not sitting in the exact conditions of their office (no large monitor, perhaps less awesome eyesight - which goes as people age…).

Another common failing of sites is thinking they can (or should even try) to treat web pages like magazines. So when you use larger fonts (very common for older users - very uncommon for web designers) the display falls apart - Trulia has this failing in the vary bad way of having content fall behind other content so you can't even see it).

Zillow and Trulia are actually pretty useful sites if you are interested in USA real estate. Supposedly Zillow is trying to buy Trulia. In a capitalist society this wouldn't be allowed. I hope it is not. But in a corrupt political society where cash buys votes and regulatory decisions it would be allowed. My guess is it will be allowed.

Related: Poor Web Site User Experience (Ux) for stock market data - Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search - Political and Corporate Cronyism are not Capitalism - 6 years Later Goolge Acts To Let Me Block Sites I don't want to see - snd then Google re-polluted the results :-(

Exploratory and Scripted Software Testing

My response to, The Software Tester’s Easter Egg Hunt

I also whole-heartedly agree with his overall point that skill-based testing is much more valuable than the ability to mindlessly create and run hundreds of scripted tests. The only issue here is that, in order to make Holland’s point a bit more realistic, you really need to add a few layers to this hunt:

• The eggs aren’t always visible at first glance.
• Each hunt lasts a finite amount of time.
• After each hunt, someone else renovates the building and hides new Easter eggs.

When you include these factors in the equation, scripted tests can become an extremely valuable asset.

Also each bug may only appear when certain other conditions are in specific states and when they are not in those states everything works fine (pairwise and combinatorial bugs). Like I can't use your comment system with Chrome ("Disqus seems to be taking longer than usual. Reload?" - just forever, reloading...) but I can with Firefox.

The most apparent/predictable pairwise and combinatorial bugs can be caught with exloratory testing. Many may not be though.

Scripted testing is good to check specific settings for specific results. Doing a bunch of this programmatically is very useful (especially to catch unexpected bugs from minimal code updates - doing full exploratory testing of an entire application every time any code is updated would take a great deal of resources - and likely slow things down too). Doing some of it with a person looking for issues in specific test cases is wise.

Thinking this is all you have to do is very unwise. You need exploratory testing by a knowledgeable software tester (or if this isn't possible then exploratory testing by a user proxy - this is not perfect but is much better than nothing) if you care about the quality of your software.

Related: Which is Better, Orthogonal Array or Pairwise Software Testing? - Maximizing Software Tester Value by Letting Them Spend More Time Thinking - Cem Kaner: Testing Checklists = Good / Testing Scripts = Bad?