First time using speakr.chef.co – musings and observations
I hope I won't hurt anyone's feelings by below, below is
what I see as an engineer. Every time I see similar pages, I make a conscious
choice to overlook these defects, it could be because I trust the site, or
because I found the thing I need.
There is no way in hell I would know how to write an
existing page, or actually implement the changes I noted. But what I find most
fascinating about my job, is there is a guy somewhere in the company – every company
- who knows exactly what comma to change to address the issue. If I were a
business, I would seek these guys out, and reward them with titles, work from
home schedules, “work on your own problem”, etc... It's just so un-economic and
un-business like to lose them.
To business:
The experience has been an exercise in patience, but only
due to an unfortunate coincidence of API incompatibility:
The
GeekWire even was announced using the Seattle address which excluded ZipCode:
"Oct.
1-2, 2015, Sheraton Seattle, 1400 Sixth Ave."
( URL:
http://www.geekwire.com/events/geekwire-summit-2015/ )
This experience instantly demonstrated the inferiority of this form of entry, as compared to the auto context/syntax entry offered by modern companies. If this is an internally developed tool for anything other than a personal project, it should be replaced with a real tool meant for the job.
Error 1:
The speakr input fields request ZipCode as a mandatory
field.
Result 1:
I had to visit google maps, enter the partial address to get
the ZipCode to unblock myself.
Pretty sure my mom would get past this now.
Error2:
As @echohack says - Default matter. There is non-primary
field that requests event start time. The defaults of the all 4 fields are set
to 23:00. Meaning the entries are valid data type, but values for start date
are totally off.
Musing:
I think an 8am is a nice default for "start time"
on "start date".
Possible scenario: a study of booking data found that most
people fly in a day before, and they actually do want the start time to be 11pm
for previous day for a networked dinner.
After digesting things over, above doesn’t make sense,
because this isn’t an expense system. An event system should specify actual
start time.
Result 2:
Had to make a couple of extra clicks to change the start
time.
Error 3:
On initial event creation webpage threw errors: "Invalid
start date", "Invalid end date". Clicking on start/end date
fields again and resubmitting the form resulted in successful creation message.
Result / Assumptions
The drop off rate here is probably very high. I actually
almost gave up here.
I wonder if there is monitoring or metrics in place to see
this kind of drop off. Unlikely, but I do wonder if there is an easy to
implement “business flow” monitoring solution for that like Zabbix.
Personal research todo: I wonder if paid version of google analytics is significantly faster at page load times than free one.
Error 4:
Allowed creation of events which have already occurred.
Possible scenario:
Could be a feature too I guess.
Musings:
Might be a good idea to check if there is an anti-spam
mechanism on event creation button.
Wonder if vanilla code coverage would pick something like
this up, or if you need something like Fortify.
Error 5:
After successful event creation, that event would not show
up in search results on events.chef.io.
Possible causes is the refresh job on events jobs is not triggered
instantly, the page is not yet hooked up to events, past events are ignored as
a result of a conscious choice (possibly even from business), or something else
entirely.
Overall Conclusion:
This experience instantly demonstrated the inferiority of this
form of entry, as compared to the auto context/syntax detection offered by modern
companies. If this is an internally developed tool for anything other than a personal project, it should be replaced with a real tool meant for the job.
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