IWCG Guidelines
The Informative Web Content Guidelines (IWCG) documented below form advice for the analysis and improvement of online web content. The guidance follows the same structure as the upcoming WCAG 3.0 guidelines, providing a way to analyse your web content for informativeness. By ranking each of sixteen key criteria, areas for suggested improvements are discovered, providing evidence-based means for content enhancements without the need to conduct user studies.
Context and domains of use
The guidance contained within the IWCG has been produced to target informative, textual website content. Typical examples of such websites include corporate knowledge bases, medical guides, and informational articles across any domain. Advice produced as a result of applying the guidelines will help you to improve your website’s content by providing suggestions for improvements.
How to apply these guidelines
These guidelines provide a structured means to assess your web content and generate areas for improvement. They can be applied by a practitioner without knowledge of the underlying theory, with suggestions generated via the rating mechanism. Note that although ratings are generated for each of the guidelines and criteria, the overall sum of these is not intended to be used as an aggregate score to compare websites; rather they feature as indicators for which areas to focus content improvement efforts.
To apply the guidelines, work through each in turn, analysing web page content for the listed ratings. For each area, rank your own content based on the properties described, remembering that these should be applied to a cross-section of the entire site rather than individual pages as with WCAG. Not all ratings are used for every area; this is standard practice for the WCAG 3.0 model.
Once there is a score for each area, average the scores in each guideline (containing three, four or five areas each). These will give an indication of which areas to focus on to deliver the most improvement to content. Starting with the lowest scoring guideline, work through the areas applying the guidance to improve the criteria scores.
Each area within the guidelines also contains a critical error path. This is a condition that when satisfied identifies that urgent action is required to improve the web content informativeness due to the lack of appropriate functionality that may cause serious issues within a typical user’s experience of the website.
The IWCG can be applied alongside the WCAG guidelines for accessibility, though the focus is different: WCAG identifies system aspects at a page-by-page level, whilst IWCG applies across the entire site. This model is most useful where a consistent design style or pattern library has been used as a basis for all content, providing an easy mechanism to improve individual aspects of a website.
Guidelines
For ease of use, the proposed criteria are grouped into four guidelines: