UX Evaluation

Expert reviews & testing

As the name suggests, the evaluation phase is all about ensuring what you’re designing is resonating with, and working for your users. This can mean anything from a simple expert review to quick unmoderated preference or A/B tests to more in-depth moderated usability tests. When done early and often in a project, it also ensures you can iterate upon and improve the design solution for users.

In short, without the U(ser) in UX, we’re just guessing and run the risk of creating random experiences that miss the mark. Read on for a few things we (or you) can do to ensure your solution has a better chance of success.

When time is limited, an experienced UX professional can evaluate your site or application, based some sort of accepted principles of usability (ie – SUS) or standards. This can help you find the most obvious things to fix and improve your product. It is not a replacement for real user testing, but is better than no evaluation. In truth, there are a broad range of design reviews that tend to get lumped together under the umbrella of expert review.

A heuristic evaluation uses a set of principles or standards like the System Usability Scale to determine how likely it is that the product will be a good user experience.
A design critique is usually a group ‘review’ session or workshop to provide design guidance during design and development. There are many ways to approach this type of session.

While the definitions above are oversimplified, the point is that we have some quick tools at our disposal to help you determine your likelihood of success when full usability testing isn’t possible or ideal. Conducting multiple rapid evaluations over time on longer projects can also be an ideal way to baseline and track improvements.

Usability testing is used to uncover problems and like initial research, discover opportunities and learn about users. It is a crucial step in ensuring your design best meets the needs of your customers or users.

Usability testing can be done in-person or online and with or without a moderator. Unmoderated testing most often consists of small simple task completion tests or quick feedback, whereas moderated testing is usually preferred because the moderator can observe, take notes and record the session, while also responding to various user behaviours by changing course or asking follow-up questions.

Usability tests can vary, but all share some things in common:

a web site / application or a functional enough prototype to test
a single (or series of) task(s) to complete
most often a moderator or facilitator to run the test, observe and ask follow-up questions
participants who are representative of real target users of the product

Iterative design isn’t a type of evaluation, but is enabled by it and is a key aspect of design or product refinement. The reason it’s included here is that it’s the glue that ties evaluation to a new round of design and testing. It completes the circle and starts a new cycle in the Design Thinking approach.

A design methodology based on cycles of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a digital product. Through each successive iteration based on most recent evaluation, the product is refined to a greater, more granular degree, with (hopefully) a better user experience.