Design Ethiopia

While the severity of an error can be construed as a degree or point along a continuum, it makes sense to rank errors for ease of tracking. A basic software triage categorizes problems into one of three levels of severity: mission-critical errors, moderate errors, and minor errors.

As we mentioned above, you can never eliminate all problems, so you’ll want to set a target level for declaring that the site is adequately bug-free for launch, called the test-completion criteria. A common target is to eliminate all mission-critical problems, most of the moderate problems, and as many minor problems as your budget allows.

Mission-Critical Errors
Mission-critical errors are also known as fatal errors. These are the errors you must catch or the web site and final product will fail. Mission-critical errors prevent users from achieving their goal.

While fatal errors are traditionally thought of as errors that crash the system (or, in this case, the web browser), in web site design this term should be extended. For example, missing a submission button on an order from would be considered a fatal error because a critical task cannot be completed.

Moderate Errors
Moderate errors are those problems that are irritating and may make you look stupid, but don’t prevent the users from continuing to do what they need to do. An example of this is a user who is uncertain of how to submit an order request because you’ve decided to label the button “OK,” Moderate problems should be ranked in order of severity and based on the cost involved in making the changes.

Minor Errors
Minor errors are those problems that pose little or no obstacle to the user achieving a task but can be distracting. Typos are often considered minor problems when they appear in the middle of a paragraph of text. Color dithering problems, alignment problems, and duplicate links can all be considered minor problems. They usually do not impede users in performing their tasks but can reflect poorly on the level of professionalism associated with your site.

Types of errors
In addition to ranking the severity levels of the problems you encounter, it’s also important to document and be aware of the types of errors that are cropping up. Classifying the type of error will help determine who on the design team needs to make the corrections and also helps to determine the severity and priority of the fix. There are four broad categories of errors.

Cosmetic Errors
Cosmetic errors commonly refer to image-loading problems, alignment flaws, readability and legibility problems, color and palette issues, typos, and basic page layout inconsistencies. These errors are usually only minor disruptions to the user, but you need to be aware that some cosmetic errors can keep the user from achieving desired tasks. For example, a missing graphic might cause navigation problems.

Structural Errors
Structural errors manifest themselves as structural design problems. They are often the result of poor information architecture or overlooked user paths through the web site, for example, a site architecture with a dead-end page requiring the user to hit the browser Back button.

Worse yet would be a site that didn’t allow a user to get from the product page to the order page. User testing can be extremely useful in identifying structural design errors and should be integrated early in the process to avoid major changes toward the end of the project.

Platform Errors
Platform errors are errors that appear only in specific hardware, operating system, or browser configurations. These appear when testing on multiple platforms. For example, when exploring page layout on different machines, the text may overflow the display area on a PC but not on a Mac (conversely, text that looks fine on a PC may be too small to read on a Mac).

Coding Errors
Coding errors are frequently the most difficult to catch and also the most devastating. Imagine miscalculating a loan or overcharging the user for services (or systematically undercharging)!

Dealing with Errors
Some of the most common problems have to do with layout differences on different platforms. The best way to combat the variations in layouts that occur due to browser differences is to test, test, and retest. You’ll want to test early, often and thoroughly. Knowing of the problems ahead of time will keep post-QA testing fixes to a minimum.