Bugs - The unseen plague of websites Part 1
The word bugs to describe user interface and system errors is very descriptive. Bugs are often unnoticeable but can significantly impact the “ecosystem” they habit. Software testing house Applause determined that the Top 52 retailers lost as much as $60 million in sales during the 2018 holiday season due to system bugs. They found that the retailers had more than 6,000 bugs impacting their sites, but a handful of errors accounted for most of the sales drop.
In this blog, I will look at common issues and what you can do to mitigate damage caused by errors on your site. While there is a clear distinction between actual bugs and UX issues, I will also focus on issues resulting from lapses in design or building the website, talking more broadly about website build/design issues.
This will be a 2-part blog where the first part focuses more on the types of bugs that are prevalent, while in the second part, I will spend 20 minutes on a website to check for potential bugs and errors.
Why are system errors so common?
I have worked with websites for over a decade, and during those years, I have encountered and troubleshoot thousands of bugs. Most have been small, but even minor bugs can stack up and make your website a pain to use. A painful user experience generally results in no sales.
The most memorable bug I encountered was in 2013. We realized that a specific version of Internet Explorer delivered different results than other browsers. In truth, it wasn’t providing any results. After some testing, we found that customers could not click the add to cart button resulting in 0 sales. Other IE versions were working, but the store was unusable for 4% of our customers. After looking up development logs, we found that the issue had persisted for more than six months, and not a single customer had reported the problem to us.
The above is a classic example where a lacking testing framework cost us a significant amount of money. However, as the impact was “only” 4%, this went unnoticed in the data as other signals were positive. Below I’ve listed what I think are the Top 5 reasons why bugs are so common on websites.
Favoritism The people working with websites tend to use specific browsers and OS
Development blindness Developers can become blind to even obvious faults in the system
Specificity The bugs can manifest after a very particular set of events
Small impact Most bugs are small and may cost you only minor financial damage
Lack of feedback The end users of the site rarely report issues unless you incentivize or ask for feedback
Common website issues and bugs?
As mentioned, there are both system errors and errors caused by careless designers and builders of websites. I've included a list of some common faults with websites below.
Browser incompatibility While in 2022, the compatibility of websites is a lot better than, for example, ten years ago, browsers still have differences, and something that works fine with Chrome may not work well on Opera or Safari.
Responsiveness We have all heard that websites should be built mobile-first. However, this is still rarely the case. A lot of websites are built on desktop computers and may end up being almost unusable on mobile browsers
Broken linking This is still highly prevalent and can go unnoticed for a long time. The link may be broken in many ways, not just that the page doesn’t exist. In part 2, you can see examples where wrong linking causes language changes and page load errors
Pricing issues In e-commerce, few bugs are as dangerous to your sales as pricing errors. Customers are cautious when shopping online, and any signs of problems build mistrust and can see your cart abandons skyrocket. As a real-life example, a store I was working with once had an error where customers were not charged a $1 extra service fee upon payment, meaning that customers saved 1$. However, this caused the conversion rate to plummet by more than 10% as customers got scared of the price changing mid-purchase.
Image issues Broken images can cause customers to feel unease, but perhaps more common are scaling or image quality issues.
Alignment issues Another real-life example is a website I worked on earlier. The checkout had an alignment issue; if a customer was purchasing four or more items at a time, the “proceed to payment” button was pushed down underneath the footer and became unclickable.
Search issues Search is one of the essential elements on a store page. Common issues are a lack of search results or irrelevant results, even if the search should be in working order. Again in part 2 of the blog, I encountered three separate issues with the site search
Security vulnerabilities Perhaps the most dangerous of all bugs are those involving site security. Backdoors that allow access to customer data, form fields that allow injection of code on a website, and broken authentication systems that allow the capture of passwords and other sensitive information that should be crypted.
How can I get feedback about website issues?
The key to a problem-free, Hakuna-Matata website development comes with knowing that you have allowed enough resources for the most critical part of any product launch: testing. Set up an infrastructure that provides feedback and uses multiple sources for getting this feedback.
Ask for feedback This may seem obvious, but in most cases, there is no prominent place to report an issue on a website. Modify your error pages so customers can give feedback on how they got there. Hotjar also recently added functionality to collect user feedback. Remember to thank and reward customers who go through the trouble of reporting issues to you.
User testing and interviews: When first launching a service, a website, or introducing a functionality, interviewing customers and having actual users test the feature can provide invaluable feedback. Even when launching this website, I asked people with varying knowledge about websites to give feedback and adjusted accordingly
Bug Bounties Many large websites like Facebook offer bug bounties. Monetary rewards for finding errors in code. Some websites allow you to list your site for others to find bugs.
Analytics software Google Analytics and Hotjar, as examples, are software that can help you find out how customers end up on an error page. This can have limited data, but as an example, I found once an issue costing more than $3M annually by looking at error page data
Set up a testing framework The cheapest and most cost-effective way to avoid errors and bugs is to set up a testing framework that tries to cover all bases. You won’t find all issues but won’t release a broken update to a production environment if you have a framework that people follow.