• Services
  • All services
  • Usability testing
  • Usability review
  • Comparative research
  • Interaction and interface design
  • Website content and interface texts
  • User documentation
  • Consulting
  • Facilitation
  • Case Studies
  • Usability Testing of Bulgarian Bank Websites
  • Experience Bulgaria
• Courses
• Clients
• About us
• Contact us

Usability review

Description

We review your product and recommend ways for improving its usefulness, usability, and the overall experience it offers to your customers. Our experts assess your product based on standards and guidelines, their own practice, and industry-wide knowledge.

What can be reviewed?

Specifications, wireframes, mock-ups, prototypes, or complete products:

• Web: websites, applications, intranets, e-shops, and portals;
• Desktop software;
• Devices: consumer electronics, cell phones, computer hardware, and printers;
• Office: forms, customer-servicing processes, and internal processes;
• Texts: printed, online, and voice.

Price

Prices start at €500 for the simplest reviews and can go up to €10 000 and more based on the number of reviewers and their domain expertise, product size, product complexity, and scope of the review. The typical price is about €1 500.

Sample prices in other currencies (may vary based on exchange rate):

• USD - $700 to $13 000, typically about $2 000.
• GBP - £450 to £9 000, typically about £1 400.
• BGN - 1 000 to 20 00, typically about 3 000.

Deliverables

Written report including:

• Strength and weaknesses analysis of the user experience of the product.
• Prioritized list of specific problems and recommended changes for improving the design.
• Recommendations for future work: areas of the product that need more attention, user studies, additional assessments, and approach to design and development.

Presentation of the results and discussion with your team.

When to order?

We do not recommend using a usability review instead of usability testing - nothing compares to observing your users using your product. Usability review cannot substitute usability testing; it can only complement it.

You may want to order a usability review

• First step. If you have never conducted usability work and are not sure where to start and what to test. An initial usability review will give you the necessary starting point by identifying the areas where you should focus your attention.
• Add-on. If usability testing your complete product will take too much time, effort, and money. You can test the most important parts of the product and the critical interaction paths, and have the rest evaluated by experts.
• Comparison. If you want to compare you design to similar or competitive products, and you already have enough user data either for your design or for the designs of the competitors - see Comparative Research.

Our assessment may also help you to solve internal political issues. We are not part of your team, so our assessment cannot be biased by political issues such as who is your boss, who suggested the feature, or what kind of work developers are used to. Our recommendations are based purely on what is best for your users.

Schedule

Typically, a usability review takes about 1 week. We would normally expect to receive your request a month in advance.

The schedule may vary depending on the availability of your product and the experts to be involved.

Methodology

We normally base our reviews on the heuristic evaluation method - evaluate the design against heuristics: general rules or principles applicable to the usability of a product. (Heuristic evaluation was proposed by Jacob Nielsen as a method for quick, cheap, and easy assessment of product usability.)

The typical review process has 5 steps:

1. Goal. Discuss the product, your business goals and needs, who your users are, and how and why your users use or need the product.
2. Scope. Identify the scope of the review: areas of the product to be assessed, assessment criteria, and number and expertise of reviewers.
3. Assessment. Conduct the review. If several experts are involved, each performs the review independently.
4. Analysis. Process the individual assessments, summarize the findings, and prepare the report.
5. Delivery. Present the results.

We base our recommendations on

• Our observation of users - we've been working with users since 2000. We've seen hundreds of users interact with various kinds of designs.
• Shared knowledge - we use extensively the world-wide knowledge of the entire usability community available as guidelines, rules, principles, standards, cases studies, presentations, trainings, and articles.

Confidentiality and Publicity

We keep the results confidential. We will not announce that we are working on a specific project unless you want us to do it.

We may use some of the findings, with your explicit permission, in our publications or presentations. We may also request your permission to prepare a case study and use it for marketing and PR purposes for the shared benefit of you as a client and Lucrat as a service provider.

How to order?

Contact Lucrat by email at office@lucrat.net or by phone at (359 2) 48 33 957 to ask for more information, to request this service, or to discuss your needs with a consultant.