UX Expert Reviews can be done at any stage of a product's development and design cycle. User experience (UX) is everywhere. And the UX Expert Review is here to reinforce this people-centric approach.
All products and services on the market seek to generate a satisfactory experience for their users. Developer companies must ensure that they are agile, easy to understand and use.
For this to happen, companies and product development departments constantly iterate their interfaces, measuring the results of user interactions, evaluating the ease of the interface, and implementing changes based on the results of these investigations.
What is a UX Expert Review?
A UX Expert Review is when a usability professional - or a team of senior UX consultants - uses their knowledge and experience to test websites. To do this, they put themselves in the shoes of a typical user. Its function is to detect possible problems and recommend changes that improve usability. This process allows companies to save money and research time for the user.
A UX Expert works like an external inspector to detect problems with a digital product. A group of usability experts (between 1 and 4 people) analyzes the issues of the product in terms of usability or user experience.
Who Should Conduct this Process?
A team of senior UX professionals should do an expert review. In short, people who have invested a large part of their professional life in UX Research. They usually have the intellectual and technical resources to understand users’ behavior fully.
Why is it Important to Include a UX Expert’s Vision in our Products?
UX Expert Reviews can be done at any stage of a product's development and design cycle. Many organizations usually incorporate this process before the redesign phase (interface development and visual design), when the project is almost ready and seeks to compare the final result with the initial objectives.
There are different aspects to take into account when we talk about why to do a UX Review; below, we share the most important (in our opinion) for the commercial growth of the product and the developer company:
1. Improve UX Metrics
Doing a UX Expert Review allows companies to access critical information regarding the effectiveness of their products. Reviewing the aspects of usability that we measure can help us rethink or replace the metrics we are using. It allows companies to align them with business KPIs.
2. It Allows You to Compare Your Products with the Competition
Analyzing the market and the main competitors will allow us to learn from their mistakes and success stories. This way, we could avoid possible incidents and ensure the triumph of the aspects we know work.
3. Faster Results and Less Cost
Carrying out user experience research involves a significant investment of time and money. The UX Experts Review allows development teams to assess the product rapidly. This helps to detect incidents and prevent errors in the user experience.
How to do a UX Expert Review?
Now that we know what a UX Expert Review is, we must understand the main components of this process. These concepts may vary according to the review’s objectives, the team performing the evaluation, the budget, and the users’ research access.
That said, here are the six most important things to keep in mind when doing a UX Expert Review.
1. Heuristic evaluation
This process is one of the first to consider. The initial thing in any UX Expert Review is to evaluate that the product and its design have the best standard practices, also known as heuristics.
This is one of the fastest usability evaluation methods. It offers a set of basic usability principles that every UX Expert should know to identify errors and propose improvements.
There is a wide range of usability principles, but one of the most recognized worldwide is Jackob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics.
Heuristic evaluation is usually not enough to detect all flaws in the design and usability of a digital product since they need more user feedback or analysis adequately linked to the user experience of a particular product.
2. Usability Testing
Usability Testing is the best tool to detect errors and successes in developing a digital product. A sample group of users is usually asked to carry out specific actions, from which the agility in the interaction is measured.
This UX Expert Review tool allows us to find defects in the interface’s design or the elements' order. In addition to helping to find these errors, they also enable early solutions to possible problems.
There are two types of usability testing: moderated and unmoderated. The former focus on specific interaction goals and helps prove a theory. The second allows a broader vision of the usability of a product, allowing one to calculate the times (or efforts) it can take users to carry out one or more tasks.
For usability testing to be effective, it is crucial to discover the main tasks that a user would likely be able to perform on an interface as well as the type of knowledge that users are likely to know when using the product.
3. Documentary Research
Documentary Research involves gathering all the information obtained in the research phase before developing a product or its user experience. This information allows for getting data on the objectives and priorities of the teams, as well as the initial analysis of the market and ideal users.
Mapping the product journey also enables fault finding in previous UX processes and saves time, unnecessary work, and money.
4. Stakeholder Interviews Stakeholder
Interviews are always one of the first steps in developing a new product and for a review by UX experts. This is so because product developers and user experience experts need to know what a company's management is looking for when creating a product or system.
The objective of these interviews is to identify the main challenges that the company faces, as well as the goals that they seek to meet with the development of a product or with the interaction of a user in its interfaces.
If you ask the right questions, you will have the correct answers. In a future article, I will discuss what these questions should be and how to formulate them.
5. User Interviews
User Surveys and interviews are one of the most informative parts of the process, as they offer direct contact with the final consumers of a product. It is common for work and development teams to skew their vision of the content or interface of a product. When interviewing users, these walls disappear, and the product can be reviewed more objectively.
The main objective of a UX Expert Review is to discover the most serious problems that users face when using the interface and their opinions regarding the task flow and other operational functions.
6. Analytical Review
Data is essential in developing, optimizing, and improving a product (digital or not); These allow us to measure user participation, the number of conversions made, reports of problems, and the opinions people have about the product, service, or company.
A deep and precise analytical review will determine if your product meets the proposed interaction objectives or if commercial expectations are being achieved. Verifying this data will help improve those sectors that are not reaching the desired metrics.
Being impartial, the data is an objective source of interpretation of results and performance of a digital product.
In Conclusion
The development of a digital product and the experience it will offer its users should always be done within the audience to which it is directed. Therefore, the more professional (and diverse) the people involved in developing an interface are, the better the results will be.
A UX Expert Reviewer will be able to identify the errors that your development and design teams cannot detect since they will look closely and expertly at all the user experiences offered in an interface, allowing usability flaws to be found before they occur. These affect the flow of user tasks, improving internal processes and increasing the commercial value of our company and its products.
If the digital products of your business are not reaching the goals your teams set, or you need to improve the user experience of your website or app, feel free to contact us. At Alto, we have very professional profiles in UX Review.
