Usability Expert Review

Usability expert reviews are evaluations of an interface (website or app) made by several evaluators on a set of design principles and rules (heuristics) aimed at creating a good user experience. These are also known as heuristic evaluations.

Why You Should Do It

Like task-based qualitative usability testing, usability expert reviews can shed light on usability issues and help save time and money during the design process.

This type of evaluation can be done faster and cheaper than qualitative or quantitative task-based usability testing.

The Approach

As the name indicates, multiple evaluators (2-4) examine the interface of interest provide feedback on the severity of the issues found. We use a combination of established heuristic design principles, developed by industry experts, in the following areas:

• Home page layout
• Information architecture and navigation
• Content density and quality
• Visual design
• Credibility signifiers
• Top user tasks & calls to action
• Features and functionality, including search
• Errors, feedback, & help
• Forms

When Is It Appropriate to do Usability Expert Reviews?

Quantitative usability testing can be conducted at different stages of the design process:

• Before the development of design concepts: An expert review of the current website or application, alone or in comparison with competitor websites and apps can provide invaluable insights during the requirement gathering phase.
• Prototype development: Before launching the “final” version of the website or app, you will benefit from testing navigation-enabled (clickable) prototypes to detect usability problems.
• Final version development: Once the final version of the design has been chosen, it is time to do a final check on usability issues to ensure that the implementation of the prior insights was effective, and no major problems remain. At this point, if no test has been done before committing to a final design, we strongly recommend doing an expert review or usability testing before sending it to the developers. Compared to the research expenses at this point in the process, you will spend more money to fix the problems after investing in development.

We often recommend combining expert reviews with qualitative usability testing for a comprehensive understanding of usability issues.

Implementation

In direct collaboration with you, Relevant Insights will:

1. Assist in determining the evaluation objectives
2. Provide professional evaluators with experience in design and usability.

Analytical Plan

Common metrics monitored in quantitative usability testing include:

• Success rates for specific tasks.
• Time on tasks.
• Error rate.
• Problem severity score on all evaluation areas.
• Problems found in critical tasks.
• Level of difficulty to recover from a problem.
• Barriers in navigation paths.
• Page goal’s clarity.
• Whether a feature is used or works as intended.

Reporting

Relevant Insights can provide different levels of reporting based on budget and time constraints including:

1. Short summary report with key findings.
2. A full, detailed report with analysis and graphics in an appealing format.

Typical Project Duration

Two to three weeks.

Factors that affect project duration include:

• Client team responsiveness: A delayed response to requests for feedback at different steps of the project will stall a project and affect the delivery date.
• The number of interfaces requested for evaluation.

Investment

The cost will vary depending on:

• The number of interfaces requested for evaluation.
• The number of evaluators.