Topic: user interface

UI Views – Include or Exclude from Code Coverage

Karega Scott, Tuesday, August 18, 2009 @ 2:06 pm

My post today comes after watching the code coverage hover just over 70%, constantly asking myself is it possible to get

100% coverage and a discuss with a few internal colleagues on the subject. Interesting to know is if I exclude the views from code coverage,  I hit a high of just over 90%.  So, is not testing your UI the end of the world? Not at all, as long as you use good development practices and aim to make your UI as slim as possible, without any business processing, branching or conditional type logic.

I've been very pleased with using the PureMVC framework on my current project, and haven't running into any Ah! Ha! I gotcha scenarios yet and frankly can't envision any as we continue to add new features to this application.  In fact using PureMVC has helped me think more about testability of our code and its single messaging bus has been just what the doctor ordered in terms of eliminating Publishing/Subscribing to events between the various components of the system, namely Mediators, Proxies and Commands.  But with great power comes great responsibility.

One could easily access the Singleton Facade of the PureMVC framework directly from your view and send a system wide message to any component interested in that message. The problem here is testability of the UI event required to trigger that system notification.

For instance in the code snippet below you would have to create an instance of the UpgradeView and simulate a click of the download button in order to test sending this notification.
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Icons are evil; so are menus – unless you do them right

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, November 18, 2008 @ 5:37 pm

Menus and dropdowns seem like attractive design choices because they conserve screen real estate while providing users access to a potentially large number of commands. But if you resist the easy out of menus and dropdowns, you may find that your applications become far more usable.

Survey the software you use for yourself, both browser- and desktop-based. Think about which applications provide the most invisible, effortless interfaces. I doubt it will be the ones that hide commands in complex menus and dropdown systems.

For some negative examples, let's look at Firefox and its more social cousin, Flock. Each app offers an advanced bookmark management mechanism, but the usability of that mechanism suffers in each due to over-reliance on cryptic menus.

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Chicago Front-End Web Developers group forms on LinkedIn

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 @ 1:46 pm

LinkedIn's Groups feature hasn't quite reached maturity yet, but my friend and occasional colleague Zack Frazier hasn't let that get in his way. Zack recently launched the Chicago Front-End Web Developers group as a way to help UI specialists network and connect.

According to their site, the LinkedIn folks are apparently hard at work making Groups more useful:

The groups directory is not currently open. We are working on creating a searchable directory for all groups. If there are groups you wish to join, you may click on the group logo from the profile of a group member and request to join.

In the meantime, you can join Chicago Front-End Web Developers using this direct link. Joining allows you to put your loyalties on display to prospective contacts (see screenshot).

UI folks, stand and be counted!

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