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.
Another positive aspect of expert reviews compared to heuristic evaluations is the fact that it is more open than heuristic evaluations, therefore getting positive and negative feedback on the design/concept.
Although an expert review, of course, does not cover 100% of the user’s view, studies have shown that around 90% of all usability bugs on a website can be found.
Limitations of Expert Reviews
When performing expert reviews with fellow designers, instead of experienced usability consultants you trade expertise for feasibility. Although experienced in the field of web and interface design, fellow designers as reviewers do not have the wide perspective and specialized experience of usability consultants - but that’s okay and much better than not testing at all.
An expert review is a purely qualitative usability method and can only provide a guide line based on usability best practices and experience but does not substitute (rather complement) quantitative user tracking when the project is finally live.
Conclusion about the Usability Method Expert Review
Expert reviews are the perfect usability method for testing and reviewing design concepts with a broad perspective. Expert reviews can be applied in a very early stage of a project (e.g. on a wireframe basis), thus positive and negative feedback comes at the right time (before detailed design or even programming has started). With an expert review you collect a lot of helpful insights to create customer centric design with rather limited effort.
Readings and Recommendations
To perfectly enable expert reviews in an early stage of your project, interfaces can be sketched with a wireframing tool(http://www.pidoco.com/en). Some of them even have integrated expert review modules with which you can conduct an expert review by the click of a button. Just google for things like "usability wireframe tool(http://www.pidoco.com/en)” and get even better results when it comes to user centric web design!