Web Quality Management : Improving UX for everyone

1. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Web Quality Management Improving user experience for everyone Csun - San Diego - March 21st 2017 - Elie Sloïm - @ElieSl 1
2. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Are WCAG sufficient to ensure a good user experience ? 2
3. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : 1. User cases 2. User’s needs 3. Good practices 4. In the field 3
5. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : The user wants to buy something and wants to receive it before a determined date User case 1 Is the delivery date present ? Did I missed it ? 5
6. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : A user filled out a contact form a month ago, and he hasn’t received any answer from the website What did I write on this form ? Did they receive my request ? User case 2 6
7. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : A user is on a website, and has to paste a password in a field and the developer doesn’t allow him to do that How do I type my password ? Do I have to choose a simpler password ? User case 3 7
8. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : A user is browsing a website, he has to get to the end of a complex process How much time will I have to spend filling these forms ? User case 4 8
9. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Users with disabilities need good UX Accessibility means removing all the barriers 9
11. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : What do users need ? 11
12. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : V Visibility P Perceptio n T Technique C Contents S Services © Elie Sloïm - Eric Gateau - 2000 Infography by @nissone VPTCS, a model for Web quality management 12
13. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : V Visibility P Perception T Technique C Contents S Services How to enhance contents and services ? Why using the website ? Contents and services : heart of the value © Elie Sloïm - Eric Gateau - 2000 Infography by @nissone 13
14. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : V Visibility P Perception T Technique C Contents S Services Before the visit After the visitDuring the visit A website is a process © Elie Sloïm - Eric Gateau - 2000 Infography by @nissone 14
15. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : V Visibility P Perception T Technique C Contents S Services UI UX A model to distinguish UI and UX. © Elie Sloïm - Eric Gateau - 2000 Infography by @nissone 15
17. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Synthèse SEO Cookies Performances Accessibility E- commerce Contents Standards Server Code Forms Print Downloads Translations Marketing Security Ergonomy Design Mobile Making a website is easy 17
18. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Universal, checkable, useful, feasable Good practice ? 18
19. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : 2004 2010 2015 2020 CC-BY-SA vv 19
20. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : 2004 2010 2015 2020 226 rules v Source : https://www.opquast.com/opquast-web-quality-checklist/ 20
21. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : • The estimated delivery date is shown before final order placement. • Copy-and-paste is possible in the form’s fields. • Form submission is followed by a message indicating whether or not the action was successful • Every information request submitted produces an acknowledgment of receipt. 21
22. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : https://www.opquast.com/opquast-web-quality-checklist/ All the good practices and their goals 22
23. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : In french (only) 23
24. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Goals Implementation Means of control 24
26. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Compliance ? Should we comply with all those rules ? 26
27. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Risk management Skills and professionalism 27
28. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Source : https://www.opquast.com/opquast-web-quality-checklist/ 29. Every information request submitted produces an acknowledgment of receipt. • To inform users that their requests have been received • To give users a confirmation of receipt of their request for information, which they can save. 28
29. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Improving the level of competencies of Web professionals 29
30. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : SEO, security, performance, privacy, global experience 30
31. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Transversality 31
32. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : A common culture, including accessibility 32
33. Elie Sloïm - Csun - 21st march 2017 - @ElieSL - © Opquast Page : Thank you 33

Editor's Notes

Web quality management
Improving user experience for everyone

Hello, I’m Elie Sloïm, I live and work from Bordeaux, France, It’s my first time in CSUN. I’m very honoured to be able to speak here. It’s also my first talk in english, so please bear with me for the errors I will make.

Today I’m going to talk about web quality management. The aim of this talk is to give you a view on what we all have to do to improve user experience. We’re going to talk about users with disabilities. We also are going to talk about users and about their needs when they go on the web.
If there’s a place in the world where people know a lot about web accessibility and WCAG, csun is this place. Everybody knows this standard, and there is no need to explain what it is.

The question I’m going to ask isn’t if WCAG are necessary, but if they are enough to ensure a good user experience.

In this talk, I’ll show you that we also have a lot of other potential problems that might block users with disabilities.
This talk will be divided into four parts. First, i’ll give you a few examples of situations where users with disabilities can run into really big problems using the web. This will lead us to the second part of this talk, where I’ll present a model that describes the user’s needs on the web. Then in the third part, I’ll present a list of best practices that aim to improve overall user experience on the web. And I will conclude by explaining what we’ve done to improve the way web professionals take those best practices in account.
Let’s start with a few user cases
Our user wants to buy something but not only he wants to buy something, but he also wants to offer it as a birthday gift, and he wants to receive it before a certain date. It’s a very common situation. If this user isn’t informed about the delivery date, he can’t place his order. Or maybe he will place the order but he won’t be sure that the good will arrive on time. So the user is not sure, he has no choice but to risk it. Maybe he would buy the same good on another website, but it’s not always possible.
Now let’s think about what happens for a screen reader user.
Without being an expert, and maybe also being an expert, a user can’t be a 100% sure that the contents of a website are fully accessible. Therefore, as a screen reader user, if don’t have an explicit delivery date, you can’t tell if the information is simply not here or if the information is here and you didn’t find it. But in both cases, it’s the same problem, you don’t have the information.
Let’s pretend a user filled out a contact form on a website a few days ago. He checks his email but he doesn’t get any follow up answers. Did the message go through? Did the website administrators receive the plea? Did an answer end up in his spam folder? Did the request properly go through?
In this case, without having a mail, a confirmation, an acknowledgement of receipt, a user won’t be able to be sure that his form was submitted.
Let’s take another example. Security is a very important issue for all the users, and people with disabilities are deeply concerned by this topic. The user has to fill a password field. The website won’t let him paste in a password. He has two options. The first one is to choose a very simple password that he can memorize. The second one is to find a solution to type or retype a more complex password. He can’t use a password manager software. He’s going to spend much more time on the form. Now, let’s imagine what happens when you have cognitive or memory problems or when you happen to be a screen reader user or even when you work with screen magnifying software.
Sometimes, filling a form can be a very long and tedious operation. When the user is going through a complex process involving multiple steps, he has to be mindful of the current step, but he also has to know just how many steps are needed overall for the process to be completed. Even on a fully compliant website, a user with or without disability needs this information. If he doesn’t have this information, he may simply leave the website, give up the process, or sometimes carry on, hoping the process is going to be short.
In the four user cases presented, we can see that having a fully accessible website isn’t enough. It doesn’t remove accessibility barriers people with disabilities will run into as they try to accomplish what they initially set out to do on the website. Sometimes, it’s going to be impossible to achieve what they came for. Sometimes it will only be slower, or more difficult, or more risky.

In fact, some defects that are strictly related to web quality or to user experience and seemingly indifferent to accessibility standards are in fact heavily penalizing people with disabilities, sometimes even more so than some accessibility defects.
The time has come to talk about web quality. I mean not only the experience of individual users, but global quality of all users experiences.
If we want to answer the question about the global quality of user experiences, we have to think about users in general. And to do so, we need to account for two factors: the humans, and the machines they use. So what do we all need as users? What are the global requirements? It’s anything but simple question.
It’s time for me to introduce you to a model I created many years ago, in 2000 in fact. It’s called VPTCS. The aim of the model is to synthesize main user requirements. Let’s imagine the relationship a user has with a website.

This user needs to find the website. That’s the visibility aspect of the website.
Then he will have to use the website, that’s the perception section, that includes the design and visual properties.
The user also needs the technique part. Does It work? Then he has to find what he’s looking for.
What he’s looking for is contents, and very often services.
What I call services in this model is what happens when the user has left the interface.

Having a quick look at this model, we know that as users, we want to find the websites, we want to use them, we want them to work fine, we want reliable contents and services. It’s not easy to do that for all the users.
This model is quite interesting when you want to understand the user experience and the user journey. For instance, if we take a look at those 5 sections, it’s very obvious that the user experience starts before the user gets on the interface. Moreover, it’s also very obvious that the journey goes on after the interface. It’s also very interesting to note that for a user, the visual or ergonomic part of the User Interface, the technical part (security, performance) and the quality of the contents in itself is the same subject. For a user, the difference we make between our web specialties doesn’t make sense.
This model was created in 2000. 10 years ago, listening to a friend giving a talk in Europe, I wrote this slide. It shows us the difference between UI and UX. User Interface is only a part of the journey. It doesn’t have to span over a long period of time. When users only need to spend a few minutes to access the services they want, they are quite satisfied. So this model is quite useful, especially when you design an experience. If we really want to help people with disabilities accessing the web and its services, if we want genuine and full accessibility, we need to work on all the journey, because the journey doesn’t begin with the interface and doesn’t stop when the user leaves it either.
In the third part, I’ll present a list of best practices that aim to improve overall user experience on the web.
What if we try to think about good practices to make good websites. When you start doing this, you find a lot of advices, guidelines, lists, criteria. Just try to type best practices in a search engine, and you’ll find a lot of resources. But, when you look in detail, it’s very hard to find something really accurate, useful and that can stand the test of time.
What we did when we started working on this project was setting up rules to qualify what may be a best practice. In our definition, a best practice is something that is universal, that works in the USA, in France, and all over the world. It’s checkable, online. That means the user can perceive the value of the best practice. And this something has to be useful. When the best practice is deployed, it adds value to the website. Lastly, it has to be realistic and feasible. It’s not just wishful thinking. It’s something that can really be accomplished.
So we decided to write rules, and for every rule, we set up a forum for professionals to provide feedback. In the first version, back in 2004, there were 190 rules and 190 forums. And we did it again in 2010, and 2015. And as the check-list was written with the community, we decided to place the work under a creative commons open licence. We’ve chosen the BY-SA license
In the most recent version, the 2015 version, we’ve selected 226 rules. The next version will be launched in 2020. It’s not a small list, and before every release, we need to be sure everybody is ok with every rule.
I will conclude by explaining what we’ve done to improve the way people take those best practices into account.
Between 2000 and 2015, we focused on compliance. It was quite logical. It means you have rules, and those rules are both useful and realistic. But having rules isn’t enough. So we worked on automatic testing, agile methods, reporting tools, addons. But we failed. Why did we fail?

First, people understand the rules, but don’t truly understand why those rules exist in the first place. They just see new constraints. They want quality compliance to be something fully automatable, they just have to check and deploy. I’m talking to accessibility professionals, it probably sounds painfully familiar to you as well. As accessibility professionals, you know it’s not that simple. People have to work, to learn, to understand. So in 2015 we decided to radically change our approach.
As a web professional, or more broadly, as any kind of professional, you don’t do something only because you’ve seen others do it, because it’s mandatory, or because somebody told you to. You do something because you know it’s going to be useful, or that it prevents risks for anyone who’s going to use your work.
So what if instead of trying to be compliant, we trained and certified people to master risk management. The main question would be: why did you decide to do this? You do it for those for whom it’s going to prove useful. For which users, which humans, which machines. Beyond accessibility, beyond quality, it’s about professionalism. When I do something, I don’t rely on luck. And as a professional if I decide not to be compliant to one rule, i understand the risks.
Improving the level of competencies of the Web professionals. That’s what we’ve done in France. We’ve started working with schools, then web agencies, then companies, then training centers, and now we have around 3000 certified professionals throughout Europe. They are not accessibility experts. They just happen to have a good understand of what users go through and what they expect as they use the web. We also aim to train and certify marketing, salespeople.
And as we decide to no longer focus on user with special needs but on humans, whether they have special needs or not, we begin to look at every aspects of users needs. We implicitly address issues like SEO, security, usability, trust, authority, confidence, e-commerce, and obviously, accessibility. Let me show you a little diagram.
When you have to work on topics like accessibility, seo, security, standards compliance, ecodesign, you always can go very far. In every domain, there’s no limit to what you can do.
You could spend your entire life trying to meet full compliance for all your web pages against WCAG. And even if you succeeded, you still wouldn’t be able to guarantee everyone would be able to fully access your website. Can you go further? You still always go further. What I say is not only true about accessibility - it’s the same issue with SEO, with security, with usability, etc.
Obviously, such important issues must be taken into account as soon as the service is designed.
What we try to do with our checklist is give web professionals a common culture of user needs. We help them hone their reflexes. We also want them to understand one another, speak the same language. We want them to understand the real value of their respective jobs. We want to set a threshold of quality to work in our sector. In France, we see that when people reach this first step, they are more likely to become accessibility experts, but also, security experts, why not?! If you allow me this analogy, before having cardiologists, radiologists, or brain specialists, let’s ensure everyone has general practitioner skills. We have to have everyone being able to mitigate risks for everyone. What if accessibility, security, privacy all ultimately boiled down to a question of professionalism?
Thank you very much; I’m happy to take your questions now.

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