While we do recommend using the Suggest Improvement feature in certain cases, it is not required and your work will not be rejected if you do not use it. If you choose not to use Suggest Improvement, follow the instruction to the best of your ability and answer Yes or No accordingly. Whenever you answer “No”, always be sure to leave a clear and concise comment about the issue you experienced.
Read on for some general guidelines on how to use Suggest Improvement. See Rules 2 & 3 to learn how this feature should be applied to quotes, placeholders, and pop-ups!
Suggest Improvement Basics
- Suggest Improvement should not be used to move forward with a step that should be failed for any reason
- Please remember that SI comments should be left in English only
- Rude or unhelpful comments will not be tolerated, and can lead to your account being blocked. You can find examples of helpful and unhelpful comments in the “Examples of when to apply each category” section below.
- Any VM issues should be reported to Rainforest staff through a help ticket, not in SI comment
- You can never be too polite when leaving a comment :)
Suggest Improvement Categories
- This step can be broken into multiple steps
- These instructions are hard to understand
- The action you want me to do is not fully described
- I see an additional problem that is not asked as part of the question
- There was an unexpected pop-up in this step
Note: While we recommend the use of Suggest Improvement in certain situations, it is not required. If you choose not to use SI, follow the instruction to the best of your ability and answer Yes or No accordingly.
Examples of when to apply each category
This step can be broken into multiple steps
Instructions: Navigate to the “Crafts” page. Once loaded, hover over the menu on the left hand side and click “Crochet and Knitting Crafts” option. Once the page is loaded, click on the first product you see (“Squishy” brand yarn). Does a new page load? After the page has loaded, add 3 of the yarn into your cart. Proceed to checkout. Does your cart load and show all 3 balls of yarn?
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Helpful: Having multiple questions in one step can be problematic, since it’s possible that the answer to one question could be “yes” while the answer to the other could be “no”, and we don’t have the ability to provide more than one answer per step. You may receive more accurate results if you break this up into two separate steps with one question each.
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Not helpful: This job is unfair to testers! This user always asks many questions in a step, it is very annoying and difficult to follow.
These instructions are hard to understand
Instructions: Please fully read the instruction set before you begin the execution of the step, paying particular attention to the provided note and GIFs *** In the title, enter "Hello Tester867910". In the message section, type the message with special characters "Hi, Let's take a survey to decide the location for our next trip!!". Click on "insert placeholder" and add in "Add first name" by clicking on it. Please also click "Attach Document" and upload a file from the sample_media folder, and then click "Attach Photo" and upload an image from the sample_media folder. Note: After clicking Attach Document or Attach Photo buttons, click the Upload File button and in the file chooser window that appears navigate to the sample_media folder and pick a file or image from there. See gifs for reference : screenshot | screenshot. Does the text and photo display and were you able to attach the file?
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Helpful: These instructions are difficult to follow. I needed to read them a few times in order to retain & understand everything before beginning the execution of the step. It may help to simplify these instructions by breaking up some of the longer sentences and removing quotes & other symbols (e.g. ****) where they aren’t completely necessary.
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Not Helpful: these steps are too complicated! clients test are always poorly written and its impossible to know what you want us to do.
The action you want me to do is not fully described
Instructions: Navigate to the “Dinner” menu. Were you able to download the “Dinner” menu?
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Helpful: There is an additional “Download file” button to click that is not mentioned in the steps here. For clear and explicit instructions you may want to include this information.
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Not Helpful: instructions aren’t clear, we testers are not mind readers and don’t have access to crystal balls to guess what steps we need to take in between
I see an additional problem that is not asked as part of the question
Instructions: “Scroll down the page and look for the social sharing buttons? Do you see the buttons in a single line at the bottom?”
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Helpful: When reading through the page, I noticed that “working” is misspelled in the second paragraph.
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Not Helpful: there is a misspelled word on the page
There was an unexpected pop-up in this step
Instructions: Click 'Learning'. Has another page loaded?
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Helpful: I was asked to confirm to leave the page after clicking ‘Learning’ as instructed. I confirmed in order to move forward.
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Not Helpful: I closed a pop up