I spent yesterday evening on some exploration tests against a web application me and a couple of my friends work on. By the way: I think I’ll always enjoy that task – going with the flow instead of following any test scenario, finding bugs just because feelings pushed you to dig somewhere. After submitting several bugs in a bug tracker an observation came to me: how often we forget to test/check/improve functionalities, which are done once by single user.
Good example (which actually brought me here) is creating an account. I hardly recall any services where I created account more than once. What more, when we consider micro-ISVs where initially there’re no serious testers (probably author’s friends play the role) it’s most likely no one focus on those singular actions. Everyone has gone through the process and now it’s time to play with features. No one ever goes back to create account scenario.
The example is even better because different services often require creating the account before they give their users any real value. The user needs to go through the forgotten and painful process of creating the account or he won’t get anything. It usually happens the process is the very first interaction with the user. The interaction the service will be judged by.
The list of do-it-once actions usually includes: creating the account, installing, setting preferences, completing your profile, uploading some files (e.g. a photo), arranging application’s look and reading things like FAQs, helps and about us pages. Don’t put too much weight to these elements of your application but don’t let them rest in the abyss of forgotten functions. Make them just working and easy to pass through. Nothing more. Nothing less.
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