Have a UX Expert Review Your Website
UX/Research
An expert review can help you identify usability issues with your website and ensure that it is following best practices.
It can be really difficult to keep a website up-to-date while striving to follow best practices for information architecture, usability, accessibility, search engine optimization; the list goes on and on. This is especially true for many of our clients, for whom maintaining a website is only a portion of their job duties. And within the University of Michigan campus community, there is a huge range of experience levels for those responsible for maintaining websites.
How do you maintain a website following best practices if you aren’t very familiar with those practices? Enter the expert review. This can help you identify issues with your website and ensure that it is following best practices, reducing the need for costly and time-consuming redesign efforts.
What is an “expert review”?
An expert review involves a usability expert measuring a site with a heuristic evaluation and other best practice guidelines. In the field of user experience, a heuristic evaluation is a process in which an expert uses “rules of thumb” to measure the usability of a website. At Michigan Creative, our user experience architect conducts expert reviews to uncover issues with the website in the following areas:
- Navigation organization, structure and labels
- Usability
- Accessibility
- Search functionality
- Performance
- Mobile experience
- Search engine optimization
The issues are then compiled into a report with recommendations for resolving them.
When is an expert review used?
An expert review can be used at any time to reveal problems with a website. For example, an expert review can be done:
- In the discovery phase of a website redesign to determine issues with the current website that need to be resolved in a new site.
- To identify issues likely to come up in usability testing without the coordination and expense of testing the site with actual users.
- As a regular check-in to determine the health of a website.
Interested in having Michigan Creative review your website? Fill out our Work with Us form to get started today.