Evaluate Current Site
Evaluating your current site or application gives you a wealth of data:
- what tasks your users are trying to achieve
- what the key problems are with what you have now.
This step involves either an expert review, focus groups or a usability evaluation, depending on the project and your budget.
What we do
1. We can conduct an expert review of your site or application. We use a set of guidelines (called usability heuristics) to evaluate how usable the site is. We also evaluate how useful the site or application is likely to be based on our experience and your knowledge of your customers.
We can conduct this review as the first step in a design project or as an activity on its own, complete with a full report.
2. We can conduct focus groups with users. We talk to users in small groups, reviewing their attitudes, thoughts and feelings about your organisation, brand, site or application.
3. We can conduct a usability evaluation of your site or application with users. We use a representative sample of users to run through real tasks. We observe what they do and ask questions to find out issues about how they work, and what is going right and wrong with the current design. We use it to uncover trouble spots early so we can design to address them.
Benefits
- You’ll have an understanding of why your current design is not meeting business goals or user goals
- You’ll know what the key design issues are.
When do you do what?
You don’t usually need an expert review and focus groups and an evaluation all in the one project.
An expert review is a useful way to get a quick picture of the current site and what its strengths and weaknesses are.
Focus groups are best used when the emphasis is on understanding how users think and feel about your site or application, rather than on detailing all the design issues. Focus groups can be useful when you wish to understand users' overall mental model when approaching your organisation, and the tasks they do when using your site or application. We can also use focus groups to show them the current site or application and get some high-level feedback.
You’re more likely to need user evaluations if you have problems meeting business goals and you want evidence of where those problems lie. For example, if you need to prepare a business case for a full redesign, or work out whether you need small fixes or a full design.
