Web Design Ethiopia

Usability inspection is inexpensive, can be completed in as little as a few minutes, and can happen at any state of design. Inspection is really just looking at a web site to see what problems there might be.

Although the inspection can be performed by relying solely on your own expertise at identifying problems, it is usually more effective and more objective if you use a checklist designed for the purpose. Guidelines on a checklist are derived from designer experience, user testing and other user studies, core psychological principles, and problems that crop up again and again.

A usability inspection is sometimes known as an expert critique, but that makes it sound harder than necessary. While it’s certainly true that an expert evaluator will find more problems and more serious problems than a novice, even a beginner can do a practical, useful inspection.

A usability inspection is also sometimes known as a heuristic evaluation, where heuristic means that the evaluation is based on practical rules of thumb that work well most of the time. However, heuristic evaluation is often interpreted as a specific type of usability inspection with a specific set of 10 guidelines, which we’ll review below.

Limitations of Usability Inspection
Usability inspection doesn’t actually involve users in the evaluation process. As a result, even if you’ve identified a problem, you can’t be certain that it reflects an actual problem for a user or that your solution won’t be worse for the user. It’s good to have the design rationale on hand when you find a problem.

The designers may have had to make some difficult design tradeoffs and may already have identified the problem you’ve spotted. You don’t want to reverse their decision and end up making something else worse than they’d already anticipated.

In practice, there will be a set of problems you find that will be obviously wrong, and you should make those a high priority. Some other problems will seem to violate a guideline but at the same time seem appropriate in context. In those cases, you should either find a new solution that seems right from every perspective or hold off on the change and mark it as a problem to look for during user testing.
 

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