Expert Reviews
Expert Reviews quickly discover usability issues and shows you what to do about them. It’s a technique used to assess the usability of a system using a set of industry standard rules of good practice. Expert Reviews are carried out by several skilled and experienced evaluators using these rules or heuristics.
Research shows that expert reviews are one of the most cost-effective forms of usability and can significantly reduce project costs.
Prices range from £795 for brochure sites of up to 50 pages, to £1,295 for more complex e-commerce and social network sites.
Usability Testing
Usabillity tests observe real people performing real tasks on a site or application. We source participants appropriate to your user group, design a set of appropriate tasks, perform the test in a usability lab incorporating audio and video recording as needed, to produce a detailed report for you.
Usability tests often have surprising results as a user attempting a task often highlights issues that designers never considered due to their intimate knowledge of how it’s supposed to work.
Cafe Tests
Cafe Testing is a variation of the usability testing discussed above. Cafe testing involves recruiting users from an informal setting, and presenting them with a very simple set of tasks to perform on a low fidelity prototype. The purpose and motivation of cafe testing lies in the fact that testing a prototype with a small cross section of users, can identify many usability issues and validate the strategic design decisions taken at the early stages of a project.
Mobile Usability Testing
As mobile devices become increasingly capable, the gap between the mobile web of yesteryear and today’s feature-rich world wide web has all but vanished. This staggering shift in how we use our mobiles demonstrates the ability of technology adapting to our needs and circumstances. As people begin to use the mobile web, they expect websites and services to perform and behave in the same way they are used to. Can your business afford to neglect the ever increasing number of mobile users visiting your website or using your web application?
Mobile usability testing is similar to conventional usability testing, involving scenarios, key tasks, and observation by evaluators.
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking technology provides the researcher with rich data concerning users’ eye movements. It offers objective information about the focus of users’ attention, the prime “eye-catching” features and the order in which users’ eyes shift between different elements in a given interface.
It can be used to investigate visual factors that contribute to the usability of an interface and help inform its design. It allows us to create colour-coded heatmaps which reveal important information that can very likely be missed using traditional testing methods.
Here at Interaction Design Studio, we use the latest eye-tracking technologies to provide you with the most accurate results combined with high-quality analysis.
Let’s say you have an e-commerce site and you want to make sure that a customer will notice a new menu bar which provides quick access to product categories. Conducting traditional usability testing will yield useful information but using eye tracking provides you with data that will reveal to you where your viewers were looking, what grabbed their attention where it shouldn’t have, what was meant to grab their attention – the new menu bar in this case – but didn’t, and how you can improve usability through better design.
Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing is a relatively new field that uses neuroscientific and psychophysiological methods, such as the use of neuroimaging and EEG, to evaluate a subject’s response when experiencing a product. It is used as an objective practice in market research. It proved itself successful in measuring engagement and emotional aspects of user experience while shopping and viewing commercial advertisements.
We collaborate with one of the world’s leading neurotechnology companies. Using revolutionary metrics and state-of-the-art equipment we measure and analyse users’ responses to various interface elements and stimuli. This enables us to assess the user experience of a website or application and accordingly come up with robust designs based on rational and objective knowledge and judgement
