How to use the Advisor in your project life cycle (Part 1: Design Phase)

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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.

All pages in this part of the website look and work the same apart from the color and the content.

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.

Annotate only unique elements on your design.

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.

Leave the questions you cannot answer yet open for the next phase.

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 !

• Categorized as UX Thoughts