Checking the Standard: STAR Quality in Quality Assurance Testing
Throughout our entire design and creative process, we keep in mind the user experience and strive to ensure that all visitors will have a positive experience on your new website. Of course, we want the site to look good, but we also want to make sure that all visitors have a memorable online experience. When building a website, we must ensure that it complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We also want to make sure that it is easy for visitors to find what they are looking for and that English as a second language visitors have a memorable experience as well. To that end, we have created our STAR Standard. This stands for Searchable, Translatable, Accessible, and Responsive. Our team of trusted web experts keep this standard in mind throughout this process, including during our quality assurance (QA).
Searchable
Our trusted web experts will ensure that content on your website is searchable via the search engine and that the results are displayed correctly. During QA, common terms used by utility companies and common customer searches are put into the search engine to test. Then, the results will be displayed and the word that was searched for will be highlighted or bolded so that the visitors can see why certain pages were displayed in the search results. We want to make sure that visitors have a quick way to search and find the information they are looking for.
Translatable
Visitors to your site can come from diverse backgrounds, and not all use English as a first language. For this reason, we want to make sure that your website is translatable through an equipped automatic translation tool. Visitors can select their language of choice and the website is automatically converted. A website may look great, but if visitors have trouble understanding the presented information, it can be a frustrating experience. By checking the home page and some interior pages where the visitor is likely to view, we can ensure a positive experience for all.
Accessible
We take great pride in being ADA/WCAG compliant. Not only do you want any of your visitors with a disability to be able to navigate and use your site easily, but you are also required to. To make sure that your site is in compliance, we want to make sure that screen readers work well by using things like headers, alt text, and intuitively named links. We also want to ensure color contrast makes text legible against backgrounds and that pages are equipped with on-page zoom capability to increase font sizes. During QA, all images are checked for alt text so that screen readers will let visitors know what the image is. We also check to ensure that text and background contrast is compliant, we don’t just eyeball the text and background combinations, but we use tools to verify that they comply. Again, we want your website not only to look great but to be a pleasant experience for all of your visitors.
Responsive
People use the web on many different devices and browsers these days and we want to ensure that your website will look good on all of them. Devices range from mobile smartphones to tablets, laptops, and traditional desktops. In 2015, mobile users surpassed desktop users leading us to move to a Mobile-First design approach to our web design. We ensure that our pages do not have awkward breakpoints and that menus or menu items are not lost on smaller-sized displays by testing your site. We also test across the most popular web browsers ensuring that customers choosing different browsers get the same experience.
A good-looking website is something that is easy to see, but a website that delivers a memorable online experience for all visitors is not as easy to see. Our STAR standards are some of “the magic behind the curtain” that our trusted web experts use from design through QA to ensure that your website and its visitors get the STAR treatment.
