USER Lab

Usability Evaluation Activities

Evaluating Compliance

The goal of Evaluating Compliance is to identify whether or not a system meets the requirements and recommendations found in various ergonomic standards, laws, and/or style guides.

NOTE: "compliance" is a word with different meanings depending on whether you refer to "officially defined" compliance or an informal evaluation of some product or process based on the guidance found within the standard. While we recognize the difference, we will use the word compliance to encompass both meanings. "Officially defined" compliance will be referred to as "official" compliance.

Ergonomic standards may include:

• requirements (involving the word "should") which must be met in order to "officially" comply with the standard
• recommendations (involving the words "should" or "may") which need not be met in order to "officially" comply with the standard, but which should be met
• a compliance clause that defines what is required to be able to claim conformance with the standard
• various other types of information

We refer to complying with all applicable requirements and recommendations as "fully" complying.

Evaluating compliance with ergonomic standards cannot determine how good a system is. It can only determine whether or not the system complies with the requirements and recommendations of identified standards.

Ergonomic standards come from a variety of sources including:

• ISO - the International Organization for Standardization
• Regional and National Standards bodies (e.g. CEN, ANSI, CSA, BSI, DIN)
• Professional organizations (e.g. HFES)
• Consortia (e.g. W3C)

Before compliance can be evaluated:

• the relevant standards need to be identified
  • there is an ever increasing set of ergonomic / usability engineering related standards that could be complied with
  • USER Lab monitors the emergence and impact of ergonomic and usability engineering related standards from a variety of sources
  • in some cases some or all relevant standards must be complied with due to law and/or contractual obligations
  • in some cases it may be determined to comply with and to publicize compliance with certain standards
• the desired level of compliance needs to be identified
  • "official" compliance - as defined in the standard's compliance clause
  • an organization may wish to or be contractually required to comply with select recommendations beyond "official" compliance
  • "full" compliance - we refer to complying with all applicable requirements and recommendations as "fully" complying.
  • "partial" compliance - where official compliance with a standard is not required, the organization may wish to evaluate how well it complies with a standard and what it would need to do further to "officially" or fully comply with the standard
• the method for determining compliance needs to be identified
  • this may involve complete or partial audits of the development and/or product
  • this may involve experiments / user testing

Some Potential Ergonomic Standards to be considered include:

• ISO 9241
• ISO 14915
• ISO 16071
• ISO 23973
• ISO/IEC 11581
• ISO/IEC 18035 & 18036
• ANSI CIF
• HFES/ANSI 200
• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Contact us:

userlab@cs.usask.ca

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