Failure comes when you don’t listen. You can’t put something out there and assume it’s great. It’s up to us to make sure we’re listening to improve our chances for success—if not this time, next time.
- Alan Lewis
Based on our years of experience performing usability research through real-word cognitive and contextual exercises with clients all over the globe, we can estimate the usability of a system based on heuristic evaluations and a thorough—meticulously laid out inspection of your product. While user testing is certainly more valuable, using user scenarios, we can eliminate a lot of risks prior sending a product out to testing at a fraction of the price.
Formal Usability Inspection Advantages/Disadvantages
There are many advantages of doing usability inspection with us:
- You get the benefit of working with an expert who does done over 1,000 hours of usability testing.
- You can overcome common usability pitfalls very quickly with little investment.
- You can correct problems between usability testing sessions
There safe also many disadvantages:
- At the end of the day—no matter who is doing the inspection—is just doing an educated guess.
- Because decisions are made by someone’s professional opinion, it’s not based on data.
Findings from an inspection include documenting long, cumbersome tasks, complicated steps, identifying standards and deviations from standards, auditing consistency, and spotting issues in sequences that should be avoided.
Benefits to our usability inspection methods includes:
- Ease of learning - How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
- Efficiency of use - Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
- Memorability - If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything?
- Error frequency and severity - How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
- Subjective satisfaction - How much does the user like using the system?
