Web Quality Standards

Follow the technical quality rules.

Standards

Qualitas Plaza evaluates technical elements of quality based on standards, trends and values adjusted to international standards.

Web tech quality standards and values

Usability rules by Jakob Nielsen:

  • Visibility of system status: It is vital that your user is constantly informed about what is happening when interacts in your web due to the intrinsic occurrence of actions that can not see, and that can produce uncertainty in various situations.
  • Consistency between the system and the real world: The website has to communicate with the user in the same language. And this does not only refer to the quality of the text, but also to elements such as:
    • Images.
    • Order in the processes.
    • Methods for presenting information.
  • The user is free and has the control: You should not force the user to follow a certain path. Avoid taking it to places with no exit. The user must always have the possibility to navigate freely, easily find the accesses to the exit and buttons to alternative routes, besides enabling all the facilities you need to "do" and "undo".
  • Consistency and standards: Your website must follow a consistent standard on all its pages. Example: It is not advisable to display a menu to work differently in different sections of the Web, nor to change its location. You can not use different designs for the same element in different sections (shape, color, font), or use variable terminology.
  • Error Prevention: Before you spend time creating well-crafted error messages, you should focus all development work on creating a high-quality product to avoid errors.
  • Recognition before remember: in every process should have visible the options that the user has to avoid the least possible work.
  • Efficiency of use: the implementation of fast paths or shortcuts is useful for users who have experience in the system. It is important to provide options to different levels of users in terms of their ability to manage the system.
  • Minimalist design: Text content should contain only the most relevant information, avoiding the use of large amounts of text.
  • Help users recognize, diagnose and recover errors: error messages should be displayed to the user in a simple language to understand. It is important indicate the detail of the problem and its corresponding solution.
  • Help and documentation: Although the system can be used easily without documentation, it is important to offer a short section with instructions on the use of the system with an accurate list of the steps to be developed. This information should be directed to the user's tasks.

The standard is divided into four parts which address, reality, external metrics, internal metrics and quality metrics used and expended. The quality model established in the first part of the standard, ISO 9126-1, classifies software quality into a structured set of characteristics and subcharacteristics as follows:

  • Functionality.
  • Reliability.
  • Usability.
  • Efficiency.
  • Maintainability.
  • Portability.
  • Quality in use.

ISO 9241 is the standard focused on the quality in usability and ergonomics of both hardware and software, was created by ISO and IEC. The goal of this part of ISO 9241 is to provide guidelines for the design of interactive system software in order to achieve the highest possible level of accessibility. Designing systems to increase accessibility contributes to improving the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of people with a wide variety of capabilities and preferences.

ISO / IEC 25000, known as SQuaRE (System and Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation), is a family of standards that aims to create a common framework to evaluate the quality of the software product.

The general objective of creating the ISO / IEC 25000 SQUARE (Software Product Quality Requirements and Evaluation) standard is to organize, enrich and unify the series covering two main processes: specification of software quality requirements and software quality assessment, Supported by the software quality measurement process.

W3C, an independent and neutral organization, develops Web-related standards, also known as Recommendations, which serve as a reference for building an accessible, interoperable and efficient Web, in which increasingly robust applications can be developed.

A standard is a set of normalized rules that describe the requirements that must be fulfilled by a product, process or service, in order to establish a base mechanism to allow different hardware or software elements that are compatible with each other.