Have you ever entered a room in a new office and started to look for switches? Were you able to switch on the right light on your first attempt? Did you blame yourself for the failure? If you did, you became a victim of false blame, cursing yourself for the poor design of products. Sharing why testers must be aware of the psychology behind product design, Parimala Hariprasad talks about how design concepts—affordances, signifiers, natural mappings, and gulfs of execution—can help you become a better tester. Parimala highlights how designers and testers, working together, lead both to designing explorable systems and helping to build great products that incorporate concepts like immediate feedback and visibility. Key takeaways include learning the basics of design thinking, understanding design case studies, familiarizing yourself with the concept of natural mappings, and applying these lessons to user experience testing.
Parimala Hariprasad
Parimala Hariprasad spent her youth studying people and philosophy, and in the workplace she applied her learnings to helping create skilled testers. Parimala has been a tester for more than eleven years in domains of CRM, security, e-commerce, and healthcare. Her expertise lies in test coaching, test delivery excellence, and creating great teams that ultimately fire her because they become self-sufficient. Parimala has experienced the transition from web to mobile and emphasizes the need for design thinking in testing. She frequently rants on her blog Curious Tester, tweets as @CuriousTester, and is on LinkedIn.
Each day thousands of mobile apps are built, and many are released with poor quality. Pressure mounts exponentially on organizations to test mobile apps with shorter time-to-market cycles. Mobile app testing becomes overwhelming due to multiple platforms, varying OS versions, numerous device manufacturers, wide range of screen resolutions, and more. Parimala Hariprasad presents an approach to designing test strategies for mobile apps. She addresses such questions as: What devices should we test? How do we select them? Can we use simulators/emulators? How do we handle fragmentation challenges? Which platforms are good enough? Parimala shares her experiences and highlights how analytics and user reviews can facilitate the creation of an effective test strategy that evolves over time and balances tradeoffs between cost, quality, and time-to-market in the constantly changing mobile market. Key takeaways include learning about fragmentation, the shotgun approach, mobile personas, and use of analytics to fine-tune the test strategy.