RKCS Learning Solutions

I just started a new contract and they are already mid-project. The bad? I come in and have a whole lot of catching up to do. I need to learn the new processes, figure out why certain decisions were made, learn the likes and dislikes of the client and not try to fix things that were already attempted before I came. The good? I am a new, fresh set of eyes and bring new energy to a project. I can also more quickly assess things that the team may miss because they are tired of addressing them.

One of the things that came up in my first team meeting was a flash of white. Huh?? Well, the project they were working on used Captivate swf files that had been ported into Articulate Presenter. There were some images/screenshots in use for the application we are describing. However, there are also some Captivate demo movies inside of the file. Because the client wanted a grey-ish background for the slides, there was apparently a flash of white that showed right before the Captivate movie played. At first, I really could not see what they were referring to. Because I was not looking at this during the meeting, my initial thought was that they were talking about the pre-loader or the delay in time that it took to load the movie. One of the team members sighed a bit and said to me that it was probably a minor detail but because they had all been working so hard on this project, that little thing was annoying for them. They noted that the end user might not see it or be bothered by it, but it bothered THEM.

Well, I finally got to go over and examine the file. What I noted was that the Captivate movie was fading in on the first slide. That is a default setting that needs to be turned off.

Changing the default

** Explanation on how to turn off default fade-in setting on Captivate 3 **
- Go to Edit, Preferences
- Look for Project -> Start & End
- Deselect ‘Fade in on the first slide’

So, once this setting was turned off, the movie just appeared on the slide.

I suppose part of our job is QA. But, this definitely made me wonder about the other little things that we miss. For instance, do you ever wonder how a national print commercial gets to a magazine with misspellings? Or how a movie makes it all the way to the big screen with plot lines that don’t make sense or camera errors? (Check out these movie errors) Do you wonder how big projects make it through all of the QA testing and still miss small or in some cases, large things? Even with multiple sets of eyes, there is definitely a fatigue factor that sets in specific projects. Maybe that can also include a familiarity factor. Things just begin to become a part of the surrounding environment and cease to be recognized as mistakes.

How do we avoid this or minimize this? What are your QA processes? What are some of the things that you do to minimize errors?