Research: Expert Reviews

UX professionals conduct Web-site reviews for a variety of reasons. For example, reviewing a Web site is a vital aspect of understanding whether the site’s UX strategy is working well. You can conduct Web-site reviews to understand how the Web sites of competitive brands are doing. Most importantly, you can conduct a Web-site review to determine whether your own organization’s Web site needs improvement and understand how you should revamp it. It is always important to keep your Web site updated. Thus, working on your Web site is a continuous process of design and evaluation.

But what is the best way to review a Web site? What critical points do you need to check when reviewing your own company’s Web site? In this article, I’ll describe the process of conducting a Web-site review and explain how to identify where its problems lie. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses how to perform a UX audit to evaluate an existing product. A UX audit typically includes an evaluation of a product’s usability, learnability, and accessibility characteristics. There are several approaches you can use when conducting a UX audit. Our experts describe their preferred methods.

Understanding the user’s journey fully requires that you map the user journey for both the product and any related Web site, then evaluate both. Plus, it is important to understand the business requirements for the product to understand whether the product is fulfilling those requirements. Read More

In this Ask UXmatters column—which is the first in a series of three columns focusing on usability—our experts discuss the use of usability testing versus expert reviews. In the upcoming columns, we’ll discuss what usability techniques to use when money or time is tight and how to best conduct remote usability testing.

Look to Ask UXmatters for answers to your questions about user experience matters. If you’d like to see our experts’ responses to your own question in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to: [email protected].

Q: Under what circumstances is it more appropriate to do usability testing versus an expert review? What are the benefits and weaknesses of each method that make one or the other more appropriate in different situations?—from a UXmatters reader. Read More