Learn & Earn, Earn & Learn
I’ve been testing on UTest heavily recently and I’m enjoying some of the projects I’ve been invited to. Just to be completely transparent, it’s not big money, so don’t go out and think you’re going to make it sprinkle after a week.
The more I test, the more I think to myself, “How do I find the big bugs?” I’m looking for the crashes, broken buttons, unlimited . However, some apps, at least through my current lens, don’t have an option to reproduce a crash. This isn’t because they can’t crash, but because the options of the user are really constrained. For example, I was testing a mobile color calibrator and at one point, I found an area where you could take a photo of a room in your home, and they would paint it with your desired color. I thought tha was an amazing feature. The trouble was that you couldn’t zoom to manually color the areas the app missed. Now, “zooming” may have not been a feaure, but I thought it was important to be included as a function on a handheld device. Anyway, I don’t start the bug report right away and I come back to it later. Now, not only can I not reach that area, but I also get stuck within the app. I can’t back out of anything. I can’t cancel anything. It’s either I don’t use the app or I end up in the same spot. The imaginary walls were holding me back.
Anyways, I’ve made enough to capatilze on some holiday sales, but I want to see how far I can go. In preparation, I’ve been reading “Explore It!” by Elisabeth Hendrickson, and I took an A11y course by Marie Blake. My thought is, if I am applying this to the sites/apps that I test, I’ll begin to change my exploratory flow. Like, maybe I’ll go through an entire checkout flow using only the keyboard. Or, I can try to use voice commands to navigate through an app. I only need about 50 high/exceptional bugs to reach the goal. I feel like that’s doable between now and the end of next month. It’ll definitely take some creativity and discipline, but the result would expedite my learning.
