Today I discovered a course called ‘Bug Advocacy and Beyond’ by Rahul Parwal. He’s well known in the testing industry, and judged on one of my previous hackathon projects. I’ve heard about the test tribe community, but I didn’t know they did courses. Anyway, today I was browsing that page and noticed something odd with the user experience. I’ve reported this to them through the contact form.

Steps to reproduce

1 - Go to the Bug Advocacy and Beyond course.

2 - Scroll down to Course Content, click ‘Expand All’.

3 - I noticed there is more than 8 modules, so I clicked the next arrow to reach page 2.

Image of pagination 1 of 1

The Results

GIF of the whole journey, enjoy the smooth viewing experience. Feel free to read and watch at the same time, split screen style.

1 - The page is now displaying the footer of the page. I have to scroll back up to go back to where I was. I believe there is a proper accessibility guideline for this, but I am not sure what it is.

2 - I also noticed that the modules were not expanded on 2 of 2. I have to manually click to expand them again. From there, if I click to go back to 1 of 2, I noticed again the modules are collapsed. This means the page is resetting the expand/collapse state each time the user changes page.

You can call this 2 bugs in 1:

  1. One for the webpage not ‘sticking’ the view to Course Content.
  2. One for not ‘remembering’ the Expand All state for all pages.

Bonus exploratory bug: If you start by having some modules already expanded, some already collapsed, the Expand All button does not behave as expected. What it really does is ‘Reverse the expand/collapse’ state of each Module element’. Collapse All does work though in this scenario.

Oracle

This is not consistent with the Users’ Desires oracle (see FEW HICCUPPS article from developsense.com).

Users’ Desires. We believe that the system should be consistent with ideas about what reasonable users might want.

A reasonable user (me) would prefer not to do extra scrolls or clicks to get the info they want.

Environment

  • macOS Ventura 13.1 (22C65)
  • Firefox 112.0.2 (64-bit)
  • Tools: LICEcap to capture gif at 8 fps.