Services - Usability Services - Usability Evaluation
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What is an Usability Evaluation?
An in-depth report on the usability status of your product, including major deviations from recognised user interface standards. This can include competitor analysis and competitive benchmarking (more on competitive benchmarking and evaluations). Faster and more flexible than usability testing, it provides a health check of your product in the marketplace.
We can now evaluate your site from as little as £800 - contact us to find out more.
Why you need it
Without either a web site evaluation or usability testing, you may be building a product that contains major usability flaws - and the cost of correcting these later can be up to 200 times as much. The competitive analysis that it provides can show you how to beat your competition and increase your return on investment.
What we do
Either remotely or at your location evaluate your product against our unique User Experience Methodology. We produce a report with recommendations on correcting issues found, and present this back to you.
In detail
Your first choice is the scope of the evaluation. We can be completely flexible in how evaluations are focussed but the following are the two primary elements you can include:
- Usability (evaluates for site usability issues).
- Competitive (measures your sites performance and usability against competing sites).
Over the course of several days your product is rated for usability and checked for a number of factors, including:
- Speed of access and performance level in general
- Content and structure of the home page.
- User goal support (based on the user goals you provide to us).
- Major usability issues in the design.
- Time required, interactions required and relative difficulty involved in each step for key site tasks, also recorded for measured competing sites (optional).
- Inconsistencies in the design, and non-conformance to site or corporate style guides (if supplied).
- Incorrect, missing or invalid information on the site.
We then collect and compile the results, and then analyse them to produce the findings. A full report is created, and we will present this back to your team during a half-day results analysis meeting.
Deliverables
- Two full colour copies of the evaluation report, including:
- Executive summary of findings.
- Overview of methodology used and steps undertaken.
- Key findings from the evaluation.
- Usability rating of the product.
- Issues uncovered in the evaluation, by priority and location.
- Recommendations for correcting each issue.
- If a high enough usability rating is gained then the site is approved for the use of the Usability by Design 'Usability Approved' logo.
If you'd like to see an example usability evaluation report then please contact us.
More on competitive evaluations
Are customers buying from other websites but not from yours? Why is that? Competitive benchmarking and evaluation is the most effective way of finding out, as using our processes we analyse every aspect of your site and theirs. If it's easier, faster, less concerning and more pleasant to use a competitor then you need to know why, and how you can improve you site to beat them.
Competitive benchmarking and evaluations provide you with a clear picture of how you stand against your competitors, and how you can quickly improve.
When selling a product, how does your product compare to others in the marketplace? Customers use a range of factors when making a purchasing decision, but some of these almost always come down to usability, including:
- How easy is it to use?
- How fast is it to use?
- How long will it take to learn?
- How much will it cost in training?
- How much will it cost to support?
- Will it increase or decrease user satisfaction?
Using our competitive analysis methodology we can evaluate any number of competitive interfaces against your own and provide a wealth of information on how you stand in comparison to them. This can include positive and negative usability points as well as measurements on cognitive friction, time and effort required to comlpete core tasks.
If you'd like to see an example competitive evaluation report then please contact us.
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