How to Fix “Element is not clickable” in Selenium WebDriver tests?

Three ways to resolve the “Element is not clickable” issue in Selenium.

A repost of my daughter’s article with permission. I added the refactoring part.
You can find more Selenium examples like this one in my eBook: Selenium WebDriver Recipes in Ruby. This is also included in my “How to in Selenium WebDriver” series.

“Element is not clickable” is a common error that Selenium test automation engineers often encounter. This might be applicable to other test automation frameworks, with different error messages. There are possible two causes:

1. The element is not clickable, such as disabled or not allowed to click by nature (e.g. a hidden field)
   this is easy to find out by inspecting (via right-click in Chrome), the solution is to change/refine the locator.
2. The element is not viewable in the browser, by the definition of Selenium, not humans (there might a very minor differences)

This article will explain the second type. Below is a test failure of trying to click the exclamation icon.