Silicon Glen, Scotland > Web usability
It's Pants! The websites that frustrate and annoy

Usability, quality and testing for websites. Getting it right or wrong?

I test enterprise level websites quite a lot in my day job. When I come home and I need to use the Internet for personal reasons, I prefer not to carry on my day job testing other people's websites and doing the same kind of work for them for free which I get paid for during the day. However, I encounter a large number of buggy websites which are not only poorly tested technically but often have flawed business logic and problems that prevent the site from being used as it was intended by end users. Many of these sites are PANTS or even Total Pants. For more information on these terms see the Brit speak definition of pants and total pants. The examples on this site should serve as a guide to some of the things you need to do if you want to know how to test a website for customers from their perspective.

Testing is not as expensive as you might think

System testing need not be difficult, time consuming or expensive. Even for fairly complex sites, it isn't necessary to use expensive testing tools There are free tools such as Xenu's link sleuth or the w3.org site for link checking and free browser downloads such as Mozilla for cross browser testing. For more information on why it is important to test for browsers besides Internet Explorer, see this article on cross browser testing.

More importantly however, it is worth designing for valid HTML and for that the W3 HTML validator or HTML tidy sites are invaluable.

Not much excuse for huge companies to skimp on testing in these areas then, although neither of the above tests business functionality. Therefore when a site does go live it's also important for Real Live Users to be able to feedback on what they think of the site and for a company to listen to these points of view. These are the customers after all.

You'll find that with a small amount of targeted testing with low cost tools, that the cost for quality usability testing will be smaller that you might suppose. The end result will gain customers, retain customers and usually more than cover the costs, making quality assurance free.

List of websites

I will list here the "pants" websites discovered so far to name and shame the buggy websites with poor testing and quality assurance. This might inspire the owners to test more thoroughly the next time.

For a longer term solution, why not support support my Cambrian house idea to support reliable sites and embarrass the ones with bugs.

This is an ongoing list, being added to regularly. Please feel free to email your entries. At the moment I'm only interested in English language corporate sites, preferably UK based.