Expert Usability Reviews or Usability Audits

An expert usability review, also known as a usability audit, can help you improve your users' experience.  Our usability experts will:

• review your website or product using checklists based on industry recognised usability standards and best practice
• identify its strengths and weaknesses across a number of usability dimensions including:
  • navigation
  • intuitiveness
  • visual design
  • accessibility
• provide practical, prioritised recommendations for improvement.

Checking and improving the usability of your product or website will:

• improve customer satisfaction
• increase your sales
• reduce your development times and costs.

Benefits

Expert usability reviews:

• are quick and cost effective; expert usability reviews can take as little as one day
• can identify major usability and accessibility issues early in design:
  • before modifications become expensive
  • before user testing
• allow benchmarking:
  • with your previous products; have changes improved usability or accessibility?
  • with competitor products; it gives an idea of how to improve your own site and what to avoid
  • between design alternatives so that you can make an informed decision.

Our approach

• Our experts can review a range of products including websites, software, literature and mobile applications.
• We can review products at any development stage from early designs through to launched products.
• We have developed our own structured usability checklists which, once completed, produce a usability score for your product, allowing benchmarking.
• The checklists are based on industry best practice and international usability standards - which we helped develop.
• Our expert usability reviews are focused on key tasks and user profiles - agreed with you in advance.
• Our experienced usability consultants will conduct the review.

What do you get?

• A clear and straightforward report, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of your product.
• Screenshots to illustrate our findings.
• An overall usability score for your product and any competitve products included in the review.
• Practical prioritised recommendations for improvements.

Following the review, we can work with you to help you use the results to improve your design.

Typical projects

• Usability and accessibility review of the Comic Relief website.
• 'Snapshot' usability and accessibility review of an airline booking website compared to a competitors, reputedly better, website (findings highlighted areas for improvement in our client's site but also revealed that competitor's site had weaknesses).
• Usability review of integrated publishing system for the Financial Times carried out at different stages of the development to track improvements to design.
• Comparing the experience of 'getting a travel insurance quote' from our client, LV=, and three competitors' websites.

What do our clients say?

The methodology Systems Concepts employed broke the analysis of our website into different areas, providing clear explanations for each problem area with examples and recommendations for making improvements.  This approach was very clear and easy to understand and also helped us to build knowledge for future projects.

Working with System Concepts provided us with a fresh approach, highlighting usability and accessibility problems that we would not otherwise have considered.  Due to their input, we addressed many of these for Red Nose Day and are already building on these insights and working with Systems Concept’s again for our next big fundraising event, Sport Relief.

Rachel Moriarty, Project Manager within Comic Relief’s new media team

Systems Concepts' analysis was exactly what we were looking for.  Their expert review offered insights into all dimensions of our software.  The recommendations were practical and easy to turn into development requirements.  Understanding how we compared with competitor products meant that we could prioritise these developments to make most headway on our market.

Rich Cole, Product Manager at O2

For more information on any of our services, please contact us