How to deal with usability experts for your website?

Designing a website without asking expert reviews is of no use.  Any business website that has design related problem should know this well. Unless a design strongly communicates business messages to your audience the purpose of building a website is not done.

So what is the needful?  You need experts to identify and review usability issues with your design.  Usability experts with all their skills and experience can evaluate how good a design will support its target audience.  Hence effectiveness, goals, satisfaction – every quotient needs to be taken care of.

Usability experts with the help of generally accepted guidelines (also called Heuristics)   and personal domain knowledge can ideate which design is intended.

Now the question is which usability guidelines would be used for this job.  It is almost impractical that you will get a complete list of all possible guidelines. However a set of instructions and overview can help fix the expectations and focus on reviewer’s attention.  These are as follows: Checking with home page design, navigation, copywriting and forms as well as usability principles such as user expectations, user feedback, consistency and communication flows.

Next the million dollar question is how many usability experts do you need?  A single expert may not able to produce perfect review and best result. Indeed you can’t just depend on single opinion for the matter of fact. Multiple evaluators would be able to capture the major usability issues of a design.

Now it is understood that multiple reviewers make better decision. But should they work together?  No, it is strongly recommended that usability experts should work alone and independently. It increases the chance of actual evaluations. Individual findings are more realistic and are worth considering.