A fresh perspective is more likely to be unbiased and deliver candid feedback: an outsider is not emotionally invested in the design, is oblivious to any internal team politics, and can easily spot glaring issues that may stay hidden to someone who’s been staring at the same design for too long. Get a Fresh Perspectiveĭesign reviews work best when the examiner not only has a deep knowledge of usability best practices, and a large amount of past experience conducting usability research, but also is someone who was not involved in creating the design to be reviewed. Let’s just say that you’re not an expert the very day you start your first UX job, and that gathering the depth and breadth of UX knowledge needed for an expert review takes some time. We can’t specify a particular number of years’ experience as a requirement for expert reviewers, because some people gain knowledge faster than others, or have greater access to observing more users. If you design in a vacuum and never see how the target audience interacts with your design, you don’t build the kind of UX expertise that’s needed to review interfaces. There are no shortcuts: The only way to become a UX expert is by doing UX research and getting substantial exposure to real user behavior. Saying that an expert review should be done by a UX expert then begs the question of who is a UX expert. These documents can also rank the usability findings according to the problem’s severity or frequency.
Written documents take more time to create and read, but contain detailed information and recommendations, and can serve as a reminder for the reasoning behind certain design changes.
The emphasis on the reviewer’s past experience and knowledge of usability principles is why this type of design review is often referred to as an expert review.Ī written document is often the deliverable of an expert review, although sometimes the expert’s conclusions may be presented in a meeting instead. Expert ReviewsĮxpert reviews usually expand on heuristic evaluations by assessing the design not only for compliance with heuristics, but also against other known usability guidelines, principles of usability-related fields such as cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction, and the reviewer’s expertise and past experience in the field. In this article we focus on expert reviews. (In contrast, in user testing, you usually want to test broader tasks and avoid taking the study participant directly to the individual feature you’re currently working on.) Another advantage is that it’s possible to review an isolated segment of a design, such as a single dialog box or an exception-handling workflow. In fact, since these reviews are based on inspection, as opposed to actual use by a real user, one can even review a set of specifications or other more abstract versions of a user interface that could not be tested with participants. The distinction between heuristic evaluations and expert reviews is blurry in many organizations, and it’s okay to think of an expert review as a more general version of a heuristic evaluation.ĭesign reviews can be conducted at all stages in the design cycle, provided that there is a prototype with sufficient level of detail. Expert review: a design review in which a UX expert inspects a system (such as a website or application, or a section therein) to check for possible usability issues.Standalone design critique: a design review in which an in-progress design is analyzed (usually as a group conversation) to determine whether it meets its objectives and provides a good experience.
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