Expert Evaluation
summary | detail | methodology
Expert evaluation is a review of your product’s user interface by two or more usability specialists. Working independently, these experts compare the product to a set of heuristics, or general principles of usability, to identify usability problems. (Expert evaluation is also called a heuristic evaluation.)
Research shows that expert evaluation can identify a majority of the usability problems, with the problem-identification percentage increasing as evaluators are added.
When to Choose This Method
Expert evaluation is useful for:
- Discovering “low-hanging fruit,” problems that are evident to usability specialists. For this reason, expert evaluation is useful in the early phases of product development. Expert evaluation of the current product can identify problems for a product redesign to address. Expert evaluation of initial product designs can catch new problems before prototyping.
- Getting broad usability feedback. The evaluators can inspect most or even all areas of the product. In contrast, usability test participants perform only a few high-priority tasks with a product during a test session.
- Increasing the value of usability testing. Without expert evaluation, test participants may struggle with the same obvious usability problems. These problems can “mask” other important usability problems that might otherwise be found during usability testing.
- Including a usability evaluation when time and resources are short. Expert evaluation does not involve the detailed scripting or time-consuming participant recruiting of usability testing. It is a good fit for product development schedules and budgets that will not accommodate usability testing.
What You Can Learn From This Method
You can learn from expert evaluation:
- What features of your product are likely to cause usability problems.
- What features are likely to be successful and should be retained.
- What features should be tested with actual users in later usability sessions.
What You Cannot Learn From This Method
Evaluators, regardless of their skill and experience, remain surrogate users—expert evaluators who emulate users—and not necessarily typical users of the product. Real users always surprise us. They often have problems we do not expect, and they sometimes breeze through where we expect them to bog down. You cannot learn what actual users will do, or how they will react, until you conduct usability testing.
Sample
Related Topics
Related Tec-Ed Papers or Publications
- Structured Heuristic Evaluation of Online Documentation [PDF version 271KB]
- Usability Studies of WWW Sites: Heuristic Evaluation vs. Laboratory Testing [PDF version 110KB]
