A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk Quality Assurance For Museum Web Sites: Approaches To Checking Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY URL UKOLN is supported by:

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 2 Approaches To Checking Possible approaches: Use of automated testing tools Manual testing No testing – leave users to complain No testing – the system gets it right

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 3 Automated Testing Automated testing: Has been demonstrated Is needed to check large Web sites Won't spot everything (e.g. Web site usability, aesthetic issues, …) Be aware that automated tools may be flawed! Some link checkers only check links and not external stylesheet or JavaScript links linked with Some tools are not aware of redirects and may check the redirect message! Some tools are not aware of frames and may check the frameset page only

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 4 Manual Testing Manual testing: Essential for testing usability, look-and-feel, etc. Useful to have an objective, neutral usability testing framework May need to "incentivize" users to obtain meaningful responses But: Doesn't scale well Difficult to testing existing services Won't spot everything Subjective

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 5 Ignore – Let User's Complain "Who needs to bother with the cost and hassle of formal testing? If anything goes wrong, the user's will let me know!" No! They will go elsewhere Your brand will suffer But isn't this the default approach?

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 6 Ignore – Our Technologies Work! "We don't need to bother formal testing. Our CMS templates comply with HTML and CSS standards; we automatically check links, …" Great! This is the direction we should be aiming for. But: The software may not be 100% correct Workflow issues may cause problems If the user's environment is flawed (Netscape 4) they may still think your Web site is broken 

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 7 Conclusions To conclude: Testing will be needed But: What do we test? How often? How do we go about fixing things?

A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 8 Exercise Try exercise 3 in your group E