Have you been enjoying the summer from behind your desk? Does your weather widget tell you it is nice and sunny outside? Do you really want to go out and enjoy a drink somewhere on a terrace but you just have to much work?

Go out and let us help you to do your work.
We offer to do your expert evaluations with the UserPlus Advisor. This will help you to spend your time on the stuff that really needs your full attention and maybe have some spare time to go out and treat yourself on a little bit of real sunshine.

If you subscribe for a year to the UserPlus-Pro and send us your screenshots, we will do the expert review (3 screenshots) for you ($125 per extra screenshot). If you send us the screenshots along with your username, we will upload the project to your account so you can share the results within your team and/or your client or continue the project in the future.

So if you want to take us up on this offer just contact us and we will help you enjoy your summer!

To get you started with our online expert review tool (UserPlus Advisor) we will post  a series of articles in the coming weeks. In this article (part 1: Design Phase) we give you some tips on efficient use of the UserPlus Advisor in the design phase of your project life cycle.
Discovering issues and possible problems early in the development cycle is always a good thing for budget and planning. This rule also applies to usability issues. The UserPlus Advisor helps to list all applicable usability requirements (big and small). Thanks to the Advisor checklist you can keep track of them during design and development.

Step 1: Upload your designs

Upload the designs of the different page types in your project. To avoid double work don’t upload pages that are almost identical and serve more or less the same purpose such as different product-detail pages.

Step 2: Annnotate your designs

Annotate (tag) the different unique elements in your design. Only annotate similar elements if they work differently, serve a different purpose or look different. For instance don’t annotate multiple text links, but do annotate a text link and an image link seperately. You can easily drag and drop all relevant items on your visuals.

Step 3: Generate and run your checklist

As a result of your annotations you will get a checklist with usability requirements for your design. You probably won’t be able to answer all questions in this (early) stage. E.g.: since you are working with dummy text answering all questions about the “body text” won’t be possible. It is best to leave these questions open and don’t mark them as non-applicable. Unless you know already they won’t be applicable in the future as well. This will allow you to see the improvement if you upload the next version of your designs (pages). Listing them now will help you to keep these things in mind during the rest of the development cycle, e.g. when you start writing the content for your site. Checkout the UserPlus Advisor results page of this early stage expert evaluation

Step 4: Use our best practices and design patterns

As a result of your annotations (tagging) you will also get access to our expertise. A relevant set of our design patterns and best practices is shown on top of your checklist. This expertise should help you to improve the current version of your designs and retest.

Next steps (in part 2: Improve your usability score)

• Communicate the results within your team and possibly to your client (depending on your client of course).
• Continue with the next iteration of your project.
• As soon as your design/project is in a next (improved) phase upload new screenshots and see how much you improved over this iteration.
• Find out about requirements for elements that weren’t in your first designs.

The UserPlus Advisor helps you to run your own in-depth expert review based on a large international set of usability requirements. If you want to try our UserPlus Advisor, sign up for a free Basic account now !

There is one belgian website that gets loads of traffic at this moment. Not because it’s so interesting or because it’s so much fun to visit. No, the only reason that milions of Belgians are surfing (or should I say strugling) on TaxOnWeb.be is the simple fact that it’s even more hassle to fill in the paper counterpart. So people are using this website to fill in their taxes. A platform paid with their tax money. But is this platform paid by the user,  designed for the user?  Is it user-friendly?

A simple an short answer: not yet.

We took a few minutes of our time to pull one screenshot of Taxonweb.be through our Online Usablity tool (UserPlus Advisor). As a result we have generated a usabilty checklist to verify why people have the feeling that this platform isn’t designed with human beings in mind. After running over the different questions, the UserPlus Advisor gave us a score. We can now say that this specific page of TaxOnWeb has only usability score of 60%.

A few example checklist items that led to this poor result:
“Is clearly indicated which data entry fields are required and which are optional?” – No
“Is the user’s position in the complete task clear at all times?” – No

It’s a good thing that e-government is finally taking of in Belgian. The E-id in Belgium is a very good step towards a digital society. But the design of this tax platform is simply an digital copy of a (horrible) paper document without using the possibilites of digital web forms.

e.g.: People have to navigate from ‘Box’ to ‘Box’.  Paper document have limited space. So in orde keep structure on the tax documents they use different Boxes with Roman numbers to refer to different parts. But online you don’t have to use this concept. Use more descriptive links instead of ‘BOX VIII’ and make your pages as long as needed. Auto-check input fields, give inline feedback and so on. But that’s another story. What do you think about the usability of this online tax service?

For the full result of our 1 page expert review, you can go directly to the UserPlus advisor results page.

Do you want to run your own online expert review with our UserPlus Advisor? Go to www.userplus.com and start your free review now!