The Dialog

I logged into our application and was greeted by a new dialog. When I see something new, I normally scrutinise it, and check out its functionality. I guess I’m quite inquisitive.

The thing is, the dialog also caught my attention because it looked really odd. 

My eyes were instantly drawn to the link which was in a strange position, and the font looked very large. I loaded up the code to see what was going on. Usually, we use Tahoma 9, but this dialog was using a combination of “Arial” and “Microsoft Sans Serif”, then the link text is 10.5 rather matching the other 9.5 (which is wrong anyway because it should be 9).

The buttons look a bit dark: they are using “Light grey” rather than the standard “Control Light”.

I also thought the Email label was a bit far away from the text box. The buttons are quite far away too.

So I quickly made a few minor tweaks to illustrate how I thought it should look like.

It’s not perfect, but closer to what I expect to see. It’s easier for me to judge because I’m used to our application. Moving from the original dialog to another looks jarring since the fonts were clearly different sizes, whereas you readers have no comparison.

How does an entire team of developers and testers not notice these differences? I quickly checked the other dialogs they added and saw similar problems there. Sometimes spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, randomly double spaces between words, and some uncentered text:

It’s a complete lack of attention to detail by the entire team really.

I contacted the team, which was led by Colin who is infamous for his lack of attention to detail. His response was that he “was just following what the User Experience team gave him”. I checked the documentation he shared, and the mock-ups looked like how I imagined them to be – and not how his team had implemented them.

One of the Testers said something along the lines of “well, we debated these issues within the team, but ultimately – the Product Owner said it was fine”. 

When they did “fix” it, the developer didn’t send the review to me, but I noticed it and jumped in. It had already been approved by a member of their team, but was it actually good? Would it meet my standards? 

No. He had barely changed anything. 

The fonts were still the wrong style and size, the buttons were still the wrong colour, they were positioned incorrectly. He had even changed a few things no one actually told him to change – so made it worse.