Lowe’s Paint Estimator: Lacking Validation and QA
June 12, 2008 – 9:54 pmWe are in the process of selling our existing house and buying a new house.
As part of that, we have been getting our current house ready to sell and looking at paint colors for the new house. As part of the moving process, I have been making almost daily trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot.
This evening, I thought I would check out some of the tools that Lowe’s offers: specifically the paint estimator.
Since I don’t have any paint yet, I thought I would use their paint estimator tool to see about how much paint that I would need.
To my surprise, I got the following results:
This job requires Infinity gallons of primer (estimated labor: 0.9 hours) and Infinity gallons of finish (estimated labor: 1.4 hours).
For the moldings, even worse than infinity is NaN:
This job requires NaN gallons of primer and NaN gallons of finish; estimated labor: 1.52 hours.
For the 99.9% of the people that aren’t web developers, NaN stands for Not a Number.
So, in reality, the system should have never allowed me to submit the input to be calculated, since required fields were missing. What should have happened is that I should have been presented with an error message stating that required data was missing and must be added before continuing.
Even if invalid data would have made its way into the calculator, it should have been smart enough to return an error to the site and not display a bogus response
I can’t be too harsh on Lowe’s, since the paint calculator is provided by a 3rd party (Construction Calculators provided by AccurateEstimates.com), but they still should have made sure that it worked right.
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