Meryl's Notes Blog

There is a new initiative underway to standardize Web usability. The committee believes having standards is important in Web usability, which has little agreement on what makes a site usable. Standards are independent, encourage consistency, promote best practices, and push businesses to comply with them especially when a contract requires they be in compliance.

That sounds jolly good, but how do you set standards for something intangible? Web standards are tangible as they define what technologies to use and when, what markup to use and how. Instead, Web usability standards sound like something akin to the 10 Commandments. Thou shall be consistent. Thou shall make forms easy to use. How do you standardize such a topic in a set way so you ensure the result of 2+2 is always 4?

The standard is a work in progress based upon a model with three domains in which the design work is implemented: process domain, evaluation domain, and design domain.