Thursday, August 23, 2018

Wide-Ranging Post Promises to Discuss Broken Promises

A relevant Star Wars Universe quote and me impersonating a Star Wars Universe character to make my point should set the tone for this post:

  1. As Anakin Skywalker said, "If you're not with me, then you're against me." 
  2. As Yoda might say, "Trusting are you too much."
Now, on with the topic. On the ACT Jobs site - https://careers-act.icims.com/jobs/intro - I searched for the word "Pearson" because I wanted to know if any of the ACT job descriptions mentioned working with employees at Pearson - I was curious. During my job hunt in January 2016, if I had found an ACT job with the word "Pearson," I would not have applied since I had just been laid off from Pearson. I was very surprised when I saw the following search result:


I clicked the link and again searched for "Pearson" because there was a search result that made a promise to me that if I looked at that search result, I would find the information I wanted.


It's the same bogus search result I used to see at Pearson when I would search for the word "jetty" and see a search result, only to have a search on the search result be a false promise. In the "jetty" situation, the word is on the page - you just need to expand multiple drop-downs in order to see it and, once you find it, you may think that there is only one instance of the word, but you'd be wrong.


See, no page-level result:


But when you look at the code, Jetty is there:


I think there should never be situations like these examples when a user cannot find the information they are seeking.

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