usability services
project types
Assess how is your current system performing
Expert inspections, also known as heuristic evaluations, quickly assess the effectiveness of your current system and identify improvements to your product or service that will make it easier to use. Something that is easy to use is better for your business.
Typically, the inspection will cover:
- appearance and design
- site structure and navigation
- technology
- accessibility
- interactivity (such as online shopping, forms and searches)
Expert usability evaluation is a highly cost effective way to improve the usability of a design, or to support a business case for making changes to a design.
It is often used prior to more comprehensive real user testing and in conjunction with accessibility audits.
Inspection methods I frequently use are:
- Expert (heuristic) evaluation
- Cognitive walkthroughs
- Formal usability inspections
- Pluralistic walkthroughs
- Feature inspection
- Consistency inspection
- Standards inspection
- Guideline and checklists
Expert (heuristic ) evaluation
Heuristic evaluation is where a group of usability experts scrutinize a web site and evaluate each element of the site against a list of commonly accepted principles or rules of thumb. They apply their training and experience to conduct independent evaluations. Research shows that such evaluations can identify a majority of the usability problems, with the problem-identification percentage increasing as evaluators are added. The major drawback of heuristic evaluation is that evaluators, regardless of their skill and experience, remain surrogate users (expert evaluators who emulate users) and not necessarily typical users of the product. For more information see Jakob Nielsen's heuristic paper.
Cognitive walkthroughs
A cognitive walkthrough is a review technique where you construct task scenarios from a specification and get a user to role play the part of walking through the task. They act as if the interface was actually built and they (in the role of a typical user) work through a defined list of tasks. Each step the user would take is scrutinised by the evaluator.
Formal usability inspections
This method formalises the review of a specification or early prototype. The basic steps are to assemble a team of four to eight inspectors, assign each a special role in the context of the inspection, distribute the design documents to be inspected and instructions, have the inspectors go off on their own to do their inspection, and convene later in a formal inspection meeting. Defects found are assigned to responsible parties to be fixed, and the cycle continues.
Pluralistic walkthroughs
Pluralistic walkthroughs are when groups of users, developers, and usability experts walk through a task scenario. Group walkthroughs have the advantage of providing a diverse range of skills and perspectives to bear on usability problems. As with any inspection, the more people looking for problems, the higher the probability of finding problems. Also, the interaction between the team during the walkthrough helps to resolve usability issues faster.
Feature inspections
Feature inspections analyse only the feature set of a site, usually given end user scenarios. For example, a scenario for the conference booking site would be to register for a particular seminar. The features that would be used are navigating to the conference site, selecting a seminar, adding it to their shopping cart, filling out the registration form, and pressing the submit button. Each set of features used to produce the required output (a registration) is analysed for its availability, understandability, and general usefulness.
Consistency inspection
Consistency inspections ensure consistency across multiple sub-sites from the same development effort. For example, in lower level pages, common functions should look and work the same.Standards inspection
Standards inspections ensure compliance with industry standards. In such inspections, a usability professional with extensive knowledge of the standard analyzes the elements of the product for their use of the industry standard (compliance with University Standards, the Creative Standards Guideline, the University of Minnesota Web policy, W3C specifications, etc).
Guidelines and checklists
Guidelines and checklists help ensure that usability principles will be considered in a design. Usually, checklists are used in conjunction with a usability inspection method: the checklist gives the inspectors a basis by which to compare the product.