Our trained team of usability experts will evaluate and explore your product from the user’s point of view, all the while keeping an educated eye on industry best practices and aspects that could potentially create problems for your target user, including:

• Look and feel
• Navigation
• Content organization
• Features and functionality

Mediabarn’s seasoned usability professionals will review your website or concept based on industry best practices, standards and research. From that we will create a detailed report that identifies:

• Strengths and weaknesses
• Opportunities for improvement
• Recommendations and strategies for implementation

Why do it?

It always helps to have another set of eyes review your work. As a firm with a focus on user-centered design, we spend all of our time evaluating websites to make them more usable. Whether internal or external, poor usability can have real financial consequences for a website or product – fewer completed transactions, poor customer retention, and low productivity, to name a few. Expert reviews provide a cost-effective approach to improving your product’s design. Is the navigation intuitive? Is the design distracting? How can the user experience be improved? Our trained team of usability experts will evaluate and explore your product from the user’s point of view, all the while keeping an educated eye on aspects that could potentially create problems for your target user.

What’s the difference between an expert review and usability testing?

The obvious difference between these two methods is the inclusion of study respondents in usability testing, whereas an expert review is conducted independent of user input. An expert review is a good place to start an evaluation of potential issues and can help to inform a usability test. Expert reviews can be conducted on the website or app alone or in comparison with other similar sites or apps. We check the target against a battery of user experience criteria (such as navigation, design elements, organization of content, and features) and can make recommendations on improvements or further areas to test. As with any testing, you always have a choice about the types of work you want done. Expert reviews and usability testing are not replacements for one another. Each has its own advantages.

How does an expert review differ from site redesign?

In an expert review, we’re not aiming to reinvent the wheel. The primary goal of an expert review is to compare your site or app against standard best practices of user experience design. Measured against dozens of criteria, our report will list a series of strengths and weaknesses discovered, along with recommendations for improvements. However, most of our expert reviews are completed independent of site redesign work, which is far more in-depth.

While expert reviews provide timely direction to our clients, it’s important to note that these are predictions about how users might respond to a website and may not provide the same measurable insight that comes with observing real users using your product. A usability test would be a natural follow-up study to consider after changes and improvements have been made.