Summary
A deep dive into the workings of your product or site and associated processes (newsletters, documentation, etc.) to identify design issues that impact users’ efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction with your content.
- Actionable findings, categorized by severity of usability impact
- We tell you why as well as what, so you can apply each finding to the whole site
- Support after report delivery – we help you find actionable solutions
Details
In a design review we combine our knowledge of interface design best practice, psychological and cognitive science principles, and our experience watching literally thousands of users working with computer systems to give you a list of the types of issues that users are most likely to encounter with your site and content.
We work with you before the review to determine the site’s goals. We also ask for data you have on user types, common tasks and known issues with the current design. This information allows us to concentrate on the areas that are most likely to give you large improvements.
Analysis typically covers five main areas:
- Navigation: menus, links and search
- Content: information, tone and relevance
- Interaction: forms, applications, communications
- Design: style, visual design, layout
- Conformance: accessibility, globalization/localization, device support
In addition we provide analysis of the top user tasks on the site, noting areas likely to cause errors or abandonment.
Where possible, we rate your site against others in a similar market. This is not as detailed as a competitive review but it can provide you with high level benchmark figures that describe your site’s comparative usability at a point in time.
This expert review identifies many of the issues that you would find in a usability study without the added time and expense of recruiting users and finding a location to run the study. A single design review can give you sufficient feedback to keep your development team busy for at least six months. We prefer to use design reviews to find the large issues with your existing implementation and save user testing for untried designs that have not yet been implemented.
Deliverables
After performing the review, we prepare a detailed report of the findings.
- Each finding is given a severity rating (high, medium, low or good)
- The justification for each finding is given so that you can understand the background to the problem and use this knowledge to resolve a whole class of issues in your interface
- We provide recommendations for each finding. Some will be short-term “low hanging fruit” which take very little development resource and often give immediate benefit to users. Others will be longer-term undertakings. Many take the form of wireframe redesigns to help visualize our suggestions.
- The report also lists higher-level or systemic issues where they exist. These issues are typically resolved through a change in company policy or process, not interface.
After you have had time to digest the contents of the report, we hold a conference call with your core team. In the call we clarify any findings which were unclear, and also help you determine alternative solutions if our recommendations are not achievable for architectural or budgetary reasons.
Support continues subsequently with quarterly check-in conference calls where we discuss issues that have arisen in your implementation of the recommendations
Price: US$ 45,000 – see our Pricing page for more information
Duration: typically 3 weeks
Prerequisites: Login details for the live or test site
Next steps
To find out more and to discuss how a design review can improve your site or application, talk to us by e-mail: info@ [this site’s domain]