Having an expert eye look over your site is crucial to ensure you’re addressing key accessibility or usability issues.
This kind of review is great if you:
- have a new site and want to avoid ‘gotchas’ that could create a barrier to your users;
- are about to embark on a redesign or rebuild, and want to start by benchmarking current site performance.
Read our quick guide to Mando Group’s usability review service to answer the following questions:
What is a usability review?
Often owners of a site are too close to see things that might create problems with real life use. A usability review is simply a chance to have experts look over your site and help identify issues before consuming valuable time in user testing.
Although we offer these reviews as an independent offering we also carry them out as standard for sites we do and – in limited form – for projects we pitch for, and have more than 13 years experience in knowing what’s likely to affect experience on the web.
What will it give me?
Undertaking a usability review will provide you with:
- quick and effective overview of issues at low cost and with high expected ROI;
- strong findings based on practical user experience knowledge;
- prioritised recommendations report for quick turnaround, including presentation to stakeholders if required.
How do you do it?
1. Create personas
In order to help frame the review, we create personas that best represent your audience demographics: personality, traits, and motivations. Personas outline a typical user in a descriptive and visual way to give everyone a perspective and frame of reference for web use, and to avoid over-reliance on personal feelings. Personas can also act as a reality check throughout the course of any design project.
2. Determine expectations
This involves thinking through persona usage of the services on offer through the system, in order to collate a list of user motivations and expectations.
3. Usability assessment
From a consolidated list of user motivations and expectations we can now review the site to uncover potential usability issues. These are then listed out in a clear format along with potential solutions.
4. Accessibility & Compliance
In parallel we run the site through a variety of checks that assess how easy the site is to access, to ensure compliance against appropriate standards. This can cover ‘hard’ elements such as code compliance and adherence to core guidelines, but also softer aspects like how easy the content of the page is to read, or whether the colour contrast is suitable.
5. Generate report
Our findings are documented in a no-nonsense report to help you get a clear picture and make informed decisions. We also have experience in communicating these findings at board level to organisations of all shapes and sizes, and supporting buy-in for the recommendations.
What’s involved?
For a typical usability review, this exercise would typically only take 3-4 days. To discuss what would be appropriate for your business please contact Jonathan.
