Usability Methods in Interface Design: Expert Review

The usability method ‘expert review’ is quite similar to the method ‘heuristic evaluations’. A few usability experts gather around an interface or website and review all pages, controls and design patterns. But in contrast to a heuristic evaluation, they are completely free in their approach (okay, they should try to slip into the shoes of a potential user) of how to check, review and judge the website with all its features and workflows.

How to conduct an Expert Review

In an expert review, usually 2 to 5 usability consultants (the reality looks quite different where those ‘consultants’ might be fellow designer with an avocation in user centered design) judge the single pages, workflows (click paths) and the overall structure of a website/interface, write down positive and negative annotations and prioritize them by impact on the user experience (UX). Finally a full usability report is compiled that presents actionable advice how to improve the usability – sometimes even extended by alternative design solutions.

Advantages of an Expert Review compared to other Usability Methods

As an information architect or web/interaction designer, you will probably know your peers and can easily gather 5 fellow designers to give feedback on your site in an expert review. This will not give you the 100% of an expert review with ‘real’ usability consultants, but makes it rather cost effective.

Since there is no installation or sophisticated lab technology required, it is really easy to implement and an expert review can therefore be obtained very early on in the design and planning process of a project. Applying expert reviews and evaluating design concepts from the professional point of view with a background of long experience in the field, will help you to get the external view into your design concepts and lead to better results, avoiding re-designing of already detailed screenshots or even re-programming of code.