4.2: Expert Reviews

• While informal demos to colleagues or customers can provide some useful feedback, more formal expert reviews have proven to be effective.

 
• Expert reviews entail one-half day to one week effort, although a lengthy training period may sometimes be required to explain the task domain or operational procedures.

 
• There are a variety of expert review methods to chose from:
• Heuristic evaluation
• Guidelines review
• Consistency inspection
• Cognitive walkthrough
• Formal usability inspection
• Expert reviews can be scheduled at several points in the development process when experts are available and when the design team is ready for feedback.

 
• Different experts tend to find different problems in an interface, so 3-5 expert reviewers can be highly productive, as can complementary usability testing.

 
• The dangers with expert reviews are that the experts may not have an adequate understanding of the task domain or user communities.

 
• To strengthen the possibility of successful expert reviews it helps to chose knowledgeable experts who are familiar with the project situation and who have a longer term relationship with the organization.

 
• Moreover, even experienced expert reviewers have great difficulty knowing how typical users, especially first-time users will really behave.