Expert usability reviews
Expert Reviews are exactly what they sound like and are used as an inexpensive way of reviewing an existing site to try and identify what the site is good at and what the site is not so good at. An ‘expert’ (someone with a number of years of usability experience) reviews your site and identifies where they expect users to struggle and things that they think should work well for users.
It’s no replacement for full user testing, but instead of paying for 2 user testing experts to undertake a day’s preparation, a full day’s testing (with at least 2 billable user testers required) and at least a further day documenting the results and then finally a couple of hours presenting the findings to you, it’s the next best thing.
And....
You have to pay each of the users you test for their time, anywhere from $60 - $200 per user.
The expert review at Wiliam, starts with an initial impression of the site (taken from the homepage, before the testers really uses the site too much), followed by a heuristic evaluation (a test against a pre-defined set of usability goals) and finally an overall conclusion of what works and what doesn’t.
The heuristic evaluation allows you to objectively compare each site tested, but does have it’ down-sides (approximately 20% of the questions are about the site search, so any site without a search, no matter how good it is going to do pretty poorly). The heuristic evaluation is quick and can be undertaken by less experienced usability experts (as the questions have been pre-defined for them) and is hence cheaper to run.
