Tester Walkthrough — Signed-Out Home

Updated: 2026-09-16 18:46 ET · Reached by signing out and opening the Home tab (also reachable via the Page Readiness screen's Page Banner test — render / tap / dismiss (Mock) row, which opens the same /alpa route)

TLDR: 3 checks covering the signed-out /alpa landing: it paints instantly with no loading skeleton, and — with Diagnostic Mode on — offers an on-demand "New content" refresh pill so the update-available affordance can be demonstrated without waiting on the live backend to actually change.

Before you start

• Start out logged out — see the Login & Logout walkthrough, Check 5 if you aren't.
• Checks 2 and 3 need Diagnostic Mode on (Settings → tap the version number, bottom-right, 5 times). Check 1 needs it off. Enabling/disabling the toggle and the rest of Settings' DIAGNOSTICS section (Environment, Refresh Auth Token, Throw Test Exception) has its own walkthrough — not repeated here.
• Heads up: a fresh Debug install has come up with Diagnostic Mode already ON out of the box in this round of testing — check Settings before assuming Check 1's "no pill" baseline is broken.

Checks

1 · Instant paint, no skeleton, no pill

Steps: With Diagnostic Mode off, sign out if needed, then open the Home tab.

What you should see: The AB#2766 hero photo (two uniformed pilots, with a 6px blue bar on its left edge — promoted into the baseline 2026-09-16), the ALPA Member Login card, and Jumpseat Flight Finder, Known Crewmember (KCM), Login Help as photographic thumbnails, plus the bold blue LOGIN button — all present on the very first frame, with no loading spinner or placeholder skeleton beforehand. No refresh pill appears.

Something's wrong if: A loading skeleton or blank placeholder shows before the content appears, even briefly; or the hero image is the old cockpit/globe photo (that means site.PUBLIC.json reverted).

Note: a "New content" pill appearing here even with Diagnostic Mode off is not necessarily a bug — it means the live gateway is now genuinely serving something different from the bundled fallback content. That path isn't scripted in this walkthrough (see Known gaps); if you see it, just note what changed rather than treating it as a failure of this check.

2 · Diagnostic Mode showcases the refresh pill

Steps: Turn on Diagnostic Mode (see Prerequisites), then open the Home tab while signed out. Wait a couple of seconds.

What you should see: The same instant paint as Check 1, then — about a second or two later — a dark ↻ New content pill appears above the tab bar.

Something's wrong if: The pill never appears after several seconds with Diagnostic Mode on, or it appears instantly with no delay at all.

3 · Applying the pill swaps in new content

Steps: Tap the ↻ New content pill from Check 2, then scroll down past the LOG IN button.

What you should see: A brief skeleton flash, then the page re-renders with a new TEST - DEBUG button directly under LOG IN that wasn't there before — proof the swap actually applied. The pill is gone afterward. The cards and LOGIN button themselves look identical before and after the tap now — the AB#2766 photo cards, left-accented hero, and bold LOG IN text were promoted into site.PUBLIC.json itself on 2026-09-16 (see Known gaps), so they're already present in Check 1 and 2, not something this tap changes. The TEST - DEBUG button is site.PUBLIC.debug-refresh.json's one remaining difference from baseline, kept specifically so this check still has something to verify.

Something's wrong if: The pill disappears but no new content shows up, the page goes blank, or the skeleton flash never resolves back to content.

What this checks, overall

Signed-out /alpa never blocks its first paint on a network round trip, and the "update available" pill affordance can be reliably demonstrated on demand (via Diagnostic Mode) instead of depending on the live backend actually having new content to offer.

What's not covered yet

• The genuine live-content-changed pill — the same affordance can in principle appear from the real background fetch alone, independent of Diagnostic Mode, if the live gateway's global site content actually differs from the bundled fixture. That isn't scripted here since it depends on live backend state at the time of testing, not something a tester can reliably trigger on demand.
• Diagnostic Mode itself — the 5-tap toggle gesture and the rest of Settings' DIAGNOSTICS section (Environment, Refresh Auth Token, Throw Test Exception) get their own walkthrough; not duplicated here.
• Session/sign-in interaction — what happens if a member signs in while sitting on this screen, or while the pill is showing, isn't walked here (see the Login & Logout walkthrough).
• The hero card's accent side is reconciled component-wide, not just here — the codebase carried two unreconciled Figma specs for the same shared CardHero/alpa-cardlg-media component: card-hero-component.html (a static blue 6px left border, confirmed design answer DQ-2 2026-06-26) and card-large-component.html (a 2px bottom border with MEC-brand-driven color variants, part of UI Refresh Epic AB#1821) — a 2026-07-10 commit had silently switched every consumer to bottom, citing the newer spec, without reconciling the two docs. DQ-37 (2026-09-16) resolved this as two supported variants, not one superseding the other: a per-item AccentOnLeft flag (default false, i.e. bottom — unchanged for every other CardHero consumer: Documents carousel, Favorites, TopNav My MEC drawer) set true only on this screen's hero card, since this screen carries no MEC brand identity and matches the older, static-blue spec.