Why should we blog?

Hello readers,

Here I come with some interesting stuff to read. After I wrote one or two posts, my friends around me, who weren't aware of blogging, were curious to know the reasons behind why I started blogging!

I started answering everyone with some or other answers that came to my mind. To be Frank, I started rethinking on why should I blog! Then I thought why shouldn't I write a post describing my opinion on why should one blog!

Before you read, let me thank you guys for being my readers and encouraging me to continue blogging :)

Why should we blog?

Courage

'Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak' 

We can think of many ideas, but to speak and discuss about the ideas we need courage. It requires a lot of courage to put forward an idea in front of group of people and allow yourself for discussions. This in turn gives rise to gain courage to answer the questions, admit the comments, debate, and conclude. So, in short you end up gaining more and more courage and your courage is multiplied.

Self Confidence

When you gain Courage, self confidence is an add on. Whether you are right or wrong, you gain confidence while speaking about what you know. If you are proved right, you end up multiplying your self confidence. In case you were wrong, you end up gaining more confidence with lessons learned and knowledge gained.

Social Networking

'Social networking helps reach people easier and quicker'

In this electronic world, you are exposed to hundreds of people sitting thousands of miles away. Your words on this media speak more and reach farther than face to face talking, conferences and sessions. You got an opportunity to interact with the millions of readers on the web. You get close to others when you interact more and it would end up building good relations across.

Resources for Learning

"Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them"

Its important for a good learner to have the trait of extracting the available resources to the best and exploring to gather more and more resources. Being a blogger you expose your knowledge to the world  and you build a platform to invite people for mutual learning. This would serve as a good platform to fetch resources for your learning.

Gather feedback to re-think

The important aspect of learning is to invite feedback on your work. More you gather the feedback, more brainstorming you do. Its always essential to re-think our understandings to enhance the quality of learning. Also you get to know the opinion about the perception of the industry.

References

While we search for various resources to learn things, we need to make sure that we treasure our learning and experiences for our future references. Moreover it serves as a reference for others too. We can get back to our past at any point and refer what we did. It serves as a book/collection of our work. It will be easy for us to guide someone to refer on so and so topic instead of recalling all the things. Blogging makes sure that we don't miss any idea in the future and serves as a good reference.

Enhance communication skills

"Practice makes a man perfect"

How effectively we communicate is what that represents you. You got to work on your communication skills and enhance your proficiency. Writing a post and putting it in front of hundreds of people will make you prepare yourself better. You will be more cautious on what you write and you get an idea on how the world is perceiving your writings. This is obviously a good way to train yourself to be a more proficient writer.

Record your work

"Why don't we record our ideas and testing stories and treasure them forever?"

We do some awesome work, we crack many tough locks, we come up with different strategies, we have unique approach, we have unique style of testing etc., What is the use if we don't treasure all these in the form of writings? How will our future generations get to know about the awesome stuff we did? Its well known that we are aware of many events in the history through various scripts, biographies and epics written. So why don't we record our ideas and testing stories and treasure them forever?

Show your existence

"The industry will miss the opinions/suggestions/experiences of a tester if he/she remains quiet"

Its always essential that you tell the world what you are. Else, your presence will go less noticed or unnoticed sometimes. The industry will miss the opinions/suggestions/experiences of a tester if he/she remains quiet. Its important for the industry to know about the existence of the personalities who can share their ideas and help others in understanding them. By doing so, you are not only benefiting yourselves but also you are becoming a benefit to others.

Promote Yourself and your organization

I am not right, if I don't speak about the promotion aspect of blogging. Existing in this competitive world, we need to utilize every single opportunity that will promote us and our ideas. In fact it is our basic responsibility to let the world know what we know, and to create a platform to invite the opportunities. Also, its our duty to show the awesome work being done and awesome people being produced by our organization

Guess these reasons are enough for one to start blogging, and for the existing bloggers to continue!


Thank you blogging world! Happy blogging!

P.S: I owe credits to all the people who influenced and encouraged me to write blogs. Few quotes in this post are taken from various sources. The content of this blog may resemble the lines I have read in some other's blogs. I also thank my buddy Satyam Dixit for helping me in bringing this post to your eyes!

Heuristics - User Experience Testing

Hi People,

Its been many days I have been thinking to write something. I have made enough drafts and failed to post them. I don't know if it is this difficult to post the drafted thoughts. Finally this is the one that I am bringing to your eyes.

Through this post I am making an attempt to throw some light on one of the essential 'Quality criteria' to be considered while testing any application - 'User Experience'. 

I have tried my best to narrate what is User Experience and came up with a list of  few heuristics that you can use while testing for User Experience.

Why is User Experience Testing important?

Scene 1: You are hungry. You go to a restaurant, order your favorite food. What if it is served in an untidy plate?

Scene 2: You need to travel and reach the office in time. You caught the bus at right time and it is going at a right speed. What if the bus is crowded?

Ohhhhh crap!  

This is what we say when we have a bad experience. The question here is, why is that you are not satisfied even though your purpose is met. So, there is something else that bothers you and keeps you unsatisfied, though the requirement is fulfilled.

So similarly, we should notice that, any application, be its requirements are met, it is not accepted by users, unless it provides good User Experience. So, here arises the need to not to restrict the testing to requirements alone!

Heuristics:

Before I list down some heuristics, let me define 'Heuristic' for you ~ 'Heuristic is an approach to find a bug which may or may not be fruitful'

In fact, as the only fundamental aspect of any product being 'Satisfy the user', every heuristic we use while testing adds up to User Experience testing.

So, Here is the list of few heuristics, one could use while testing for UX (I say them as heuristics because I am not sure would they end up fruitful wrt to UX testing, as the context differs every time)

Emotion

Human emotions are what that play an important role to decide the UX of the product. Its all about how does the emotions of an user change while using the application. The app needs to be tested considering various aspects of the application that may turn off/on mood of a user. Example: Feel and Flow of the app, UI aspects, etc

Expectation

User expectations are the deciding factors. Keeping in mind the brand of the app, kind of app, success of previous releases of the app, users might be having some expectations. If the app doesn't meet the user expectations it may turn out to be a failure.

Relevancy

User shouldn't experience any irrelevant or undesirable experience. To explain this better let me take an example of error messages. The error messages shown should be relevant with the error occurred. The User should be able to understand the error on reading the message displayed.

Audience

While testing we need to test the app keeping in mind the type of audience who are going to use it. Different audience look for different things in the app. For example what a kid expects is not the same as an old man needs. So testing with the mindset of right audience will help a lot.

Content

The content of the application should be relevant and appropriate to the customer's needs. It also should be according to the business goals. The content should be structured in such a way that the user has a good experience while reading it.

Competitor Analysis:

In this competitive world, you can stay ahead of your competitor by providing better User Experience. Considering the User Experience with other competitive applications, we can end up with bunch of ideas to test upon.

 Reviews

Considering the various reviews given by the users for the same / similar products, we can come up with a bunch of test ideas that could help the application to overcome the failures if any. Reviews act as a good mode to scale the User Experience of the application.

Branding

Though the branding is always essential in any application, it shouldn't dominate the content and annoy the user. Also, in contrast, we need to make sure enough branding is done. So, tester can keep this in mind to generate more test ideas.


Remember, while implementing all these heuristics, we assume the behavior of an user. So, we end up coming up with the behavior what we (Tester) expect than what others expect. We need to make an attempt to discuss the behavior of an user at every step with fellow testers and take in the inputs.


Thanks for reading, guess this was helpful. Do drop in some comments that would help me to learn better so that I could help you more, again and again!

Happy Testing!