Lisa Halabi has a very good article at usabilitynews.com on the common question of whether or not to implement usability guidelines (aka an expert usability review) in place of conducting usability testing. An expert review is tempting because a reasonable person would expect to be able to codify what is and what is not good usability. Once that’s taken care of, all that would be left is to filter out usability bugs by way of a checklist. Take for example the excellent guidelines created by the US Dept. of Health and Human Services at usability.gov. It’s a fascinating read and very helpful.
Halabi differentiates the two techniques this way:
- An expert usability review is when a usability specialist inspects a website to identify potential usability problems.
- Usability testing involves getting people from the target audience to evaluate your site whilst performing tasks.
There are so may variables involved for the expert reviewer, that getting an accurate read on the real issues is very difficult:
Often, expert reviews will:
- Miss usability issues that arise during usability testing
- Find some issues that usability testing didn’t
- Report false alarms (i.e. not real issues)
Getting users to talk to you is where real issues come to the fore. By definition, if a user has a problem with a designer’s solution, it’s a usability problem and not a false drop. Recording and sharing actual users interacting with a site is definitely the best and most compelling way to go.
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