What is quality?

1st January 2017

The highest quality might be: the product that best fits the needs of the user.

• What are the user’s needs?
• Who is the target audience?

Standards and best practices are always changing, design for change.

Some shifts in needs and expectations:

• from static to dynamic,
• from desktop to mobile,
• from fixed dimensions to responsive,
• from waterfall to agile.

These changes improved the experience for developers and users.

Design the product and the build processes to expect and relish change.

Who is responsible for quality

A high quality product has many perspectives, here’s 3 key stake holders:

• End users
• Website administrators (the customer),
• Website build team (designers / developers / testers / managers).

Each has an important role in creating a quality product.

Measuring quality in web applications

We define the term ‘quality’ using a more measurable list of categories:

• Usability,
• Readability,
• Navigability,
• Accessibility,
• Speed/Responsiveness,
• Security, resilience and privacy,
• User Experience

Usabilty

Are users able to accomplish their tasks and goals when they come to the site. Not only that, are they able to do so in the best and most efficient way possible.

Does the website fulfil its purpose, has the purpose been clearly defined? (Calls to action/forms/CMS Admin/shopping cart. + Defining site objectives)

Usability also extends to the management of the website and the tasks performed by administrators.

• Learnability
• • How easy is it for new users to learn to perform the task? For more complicated tasks, are there sufficient help features such as tutorials, in-line tips and hints, tool tips, etc.?
• Intuitiveness
• • How obvious and easy is the task to accomplish?
• Efficiency:
• • Are users performing tasks optimally? Are there ways to streamline and reduce the time it takes to complete the task?
• Preciseness:
• • How prone to errors is the task? What are the reasons for any errors? How can we improve the interface to lower errors and unneeded repetition?
• Fault Tolerance:
• • If a user makes a mistake while performing the task, how fast can he recover?
• Memorability:
• • How easy is the task to repeat?
• Affordance: Are interactive elements (such as buttons, links and input text boxes) related to the accomplishment of a task obviously interactive and within convenient reach? Is it evident what the results of a user action will be when the user decides to interact with it by clicking, mouse hovering, etc.?</li>
• Readability
• • Is the kind of language, colours, layout, icons and imagery appropriate to the target audience. Does it follow brand guidelines and gel with the brand philosophy.

Navigability

• Is the taxonomy and navigation structure appropriate to the target audience.
• How easy is it for users to reach the content and information they want.
• How easy is it to know what content is available.
• Can bots and spiders navigate and index the site. SEO bot/spider friendliness.

Accessibility

• Cross-Browser/Cross-Platform Compatibility: Does the site work in as many browsing situations as possible? Is the site responsive, flexibly changing the layout depending on how the user views it?
• Semantic HTML Markup: Especially for those who use assistive technologies like a screen reader, the quality and accuracy of the webpage’s structure is important. Are HTML tags being used correctly?
• Color Choice: Are the colors used high contrast? Do the colors create a hindrance to people will color blindness or poor vision?
• Use of HTML Accessibility Features: There are HTML features and techniques that aid users with visual impairments. Are these features and techniques being used?

Speed

• Webpage Response Time: How fast (in units of time, such as milliseconds) does it take to load an entire webpage?
• Webpage Size: How big is the webpage, in terms of file size?
• Code Quality: Does the website use web development best practices for website performance?
• What is the responsiveness of the site under load.
• What is the responsiveness of the developer’s support desk.

Securness, resilience and privacy

• Resilience - of servers, of site code (i.e. what happens if the database is down or an error occurs)
• Data protection, cookies (EU directive compliance)
• What happens In the event of a breach or other disaster - Disaster recovery.
• Risk analysis.

User Experience

Subjective, user feedback required. Use actual end users.

• Fulfillment: Do users feel satisfied after interacting with the website?
• Usefulness: Does the user feel like they obtained value from using the website?
• Enjoyment: Is the experience of being on the website fun and not burdensome?
• Positive Emotions: Do users feel happy, excited, pleased, etc. when they interact with the site?

Ideas to explore

• Measuring and testing at the design stage and then also at the build stage iteratively.
• Measuring the competition.
• Measuring previous/older incarnations of the site.
• Profiling site usage to measure improvements.
• A/B testing.
• When costing establish the business value vs the development when looking at features.
• Demonstrating value - analytics, form submission value, return on investment.

References: http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/website-usability-tools/#I5hHpwNPOkqX

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