User Experience Web Site Test Guidelines

Summary

This is a collection of the test guidelines for web sites will be applied by the User eXperience Committee (UXC) in any IDESG evaluation. This page only addresses the user experience and not internal compliance of the web site.

Guidelines

Generic Guidelines

These guidelines apply only to the identity components and display of a generic web site.

1. An untrained user with an 8th grade education can understand the public web pages.
2. A non-technical user can understand the purposes of the web site and the level of technical expertise, if any, required once the user is registered.
3. The web site will treat users as anonymous until they register and tell them in advance what information will be tracked after they register as a part of the registration page.
4. The web site will be fully functional for the most common web browsers without Do Not Track enabled on the browser.
5. The web site will be fully functional for the most common user devices including laptop computers and cell phones, either in landscape or portrait mode.

Specific Guidelines for impaired users

1. All elements on the web page have title and hover fields enabled and informative as might be needed for hearing or sight impaired users.
2. Users with hearing or sight impairments can function to the extent possible on the web site with devices typical for their impairment.
3. The web site will be fully functional when operated in "High Contrast" or "Large Type" mode for sight impaired users.
4. All critical fields can be navigated with tabbing capability of the user device.

Specific Guidelines for IDESG web sites

In the case of IDESG web site the UXC plans to look at the entire web site.

1. The IDEF web site will meet its own guidelines and display its own results.
2. The IDEF web page that is reached from an IDEF compliant entity can be understood without any other context. The working assumption is that the compliant entity will have a link to the IDEF web site at a point appropriate for the human user to understand the meaning of the IDEF mark ON THAT WEB SITE. So the user is assumed to only know the site that linked to the IDEF web page and has no other information about the IDESG or the IDEF.
3. The current method of counting both the number of IDEF guidelines used and the number attested as compliant by the assessor is very difficult for even a technical user to understand. One solution would be to use the IDEF roles (RA, CA, etc.) to just selected the guidelines to be applied, ask the assessor one time about that guideline and then report the number of guidelines in compliance for the site (entity).

References

• User Experience Guidelines and Metrics
• The W3 accessibility criteria.