Web Quality and UX Best Practices

Dear english speaking web professionals, we have great news: the web quality opquast checklist is now available in english. Some of you know about the Opquast (Open Quality Standards) project. For those who don’t, here’s a quick overview.

In 2004, Fabrice Bonny and I asked if it was possible to write a list of universal, checkable, realistic and acceptable rules for the improvement of the quality of online services and User Experience on the web.

We wrote a first list, discussed it publicly with a team of various contributors, published a first version in 2004 and a second one in 2010. The 217 best practices in this second version are published under the creative commons By-Sa license. Every best practice is associated to a sheet which is not yet available in English. The list is also published as a memento Eyrolles (10 000 mementos sold in French since 2008, third edition). Thanks to their open license, those best practices are utilized to specify some requirements, or to control the quality of a website when it’s finished or even better, during its production. The English translation has been prepared by Stéphane Deschamps, thanks to him for such a great job. It’s about time we offered this checklist in English. If you ever find a post on the web whose title starts by “the ultimate checklist …”, just inform the author that maybe the real ultimate checklist is to be found on the Open Quality Standards Website.

And if you get to know Opquast project, maybe you’ll find out that the ultimate tool to check and improve a website’s quality and accessibility might not be that far. It’s called Opquast reporting, and it’ll be available in English very shortly.