Wireframes Usability Inspection

You might think that testing wireframes makes no sense and it's a waste of time. Let's imagine the opposite — suppose you wait until the final product is ready. The product is launched and users are already exploring it. User feedback shows UI inconsistencies, unappealing design, navigational issues, and other bugs. At this point, it'll cost you a lot of time and effort to investigate problems and find solutions.

So that's the main argument for wireframe testing — it's simply cheaper. To test an iteration you only need some hand-drawn wireframes. Get feedback from users, colleagues, and stakeholders to validate your ideas. Each new iteration will provide incremental changes making your designs better and better.

Usability inspection is great if your team doesn't have a lot of time or resources. Usability inspection is the generic name for a set of methods for idea evaluation and finding usability issues. The advantage is that you don't need to contact users. Instead, the evaluation relies on usability principles and user needs.

Usability inspection usually involves evaluators — experts in evaluating interfaces — and a list of usability principles.

The most popular methods of usability inspection include:

• Heuristic evaluation
• Cognitive walkthrough
• Feature inspection
• Consistency inspection^[1]

At first glance, usability inspection seems like a perfect tool to test designs. It's cheap, fast, and can be done at any stage of a product lifecycle. However, there are some downsides:

• Usability inspection methods are based on theoretical principles. They can't replace an actual user interview or observation of users performing tasks in your app. Ideally, inspection should be followed by user testing.
• An evaluator is a human being, and they have their own biases.
• While heuristics and usability principles are universal they can become outdated over time. A better strategy is to create heuristics tailored to your product and brand.

Heuristics are the general principles of interaction design. They are more like broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines. An evaluator uses heuristics to measure design usability and assess problem severity. Simply put, evaluators study a screen or an interaction and see if they meet usability standards.

Jacob Nielsen's heuristics are the most commonly used list of usability heuristics. They were written back in the 1990s and are still relevant, although you might want to adjust them to current technologies.

The list includes 10 heuristics:

• Visibility of system status
• Match between system and the real world
• User control and freedom
• Consistency and standards
• Error prevention
• Recognition rather than recall
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
• Help and documentation.^[2]

Cognitive walkthrough is one of the usability inspection methods. Like other methods, it allows evaluating interfaces without user involvement. A cognitive walkthrough uses personas — user profiles — to represent users. Then it assesses task performance by persona. In other words, evaluators walk through specific wireflows as these personas. After each step, the evaluators leave relevant notes in the walkthrough document. These notes usually provide recommendations on how the journey can be improved.

To conduct an efficient usability inspection, you need to plan it beforehand. It will give you a sense of control over your work and help foresee inconsistencies. It also lets you discuss the plan with your team. A plan will help you define levels of severity, details of wireframes, what evaluators you want to involve, and other important things.

You might need to have at hand:

1. User profile(s)
2. Goals
3. Scenarios
4. Wireframes
5. Evaluators

Ultimately, the usability inspection should define the scope — you can't test all functionality at once. Based on user goals, you decide what features and scenarios you want to include in the scope. Then select wireframes that you need for this testing session. Leave out scenarios that are outside the scope at this point.

Usability inspection methods don't require users, but they should rely on user needs and problems. How do you know what your users need and what pains they have?

There are many ways to get this data:

• Conduct user interviews
• Evaluate analytics
• Investigate your competitors
• Make use of other research tools within your budget and time limits

Create a user persona based on these findings. A user persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your target audience. You can add some demographic details if you want. More importantly, you need to define user needs, goals, frustrations, and motivations. You can also add skills and other background information.

Personas allow you to look at problems from a user perspective. They can help you formulate scenarios and features you want to test in the next steps.

Usually, goals define a need that users want to fulfill. But in inspection evaluation, goals are what users actually get when they complete a task. Also, having goals helps evaluators stay on track when they go through a scenario. Basically, evaluators assess if it's easy to accomplish the goal — or if the journey involves guesswork or friction.

When formulating goals, be specific and highlight the benefits for users. For example, the goal "I want to write good essays" is too generic. Be more specific — for example:

• "I want to get topic recommendations"
• "I want to improve my grammar and style"
• "I need writing tips"

A scenario refers to a list of actions users need to perform to complete the task to achieve their goal. And that's how designers usually define scenarios — based on user needs and goals. Teams can also make assumptions about how users navigate the product. Inspection evaluation and user testing methods either prove these assumptions wrong or confirm the hypothesis.

Composing scenarios, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is going to take the route and complete the task? When answering, make use of the personas.
• What goals do they pursue?
• When do they usually perform this task?
• Where do they perform this task?
• Why do they need to do it?

So you've set the scope and defined what features you want to test and what user goals they help achieve. The next step is creating wireframes to help you visualize the features of your inspection.

Make sure the wireframes are detailed enough, contain wireframe text, and cover all scenarios you want to test. Wireframe fidelity depends on your goals and budget. You can test pretty much anything — from hand-drawn sketches to digital click-through prototypes. However, the latter provides a more realistic experience of working with a product.

In any case, usability inspections should bring up crucial usability issues.

Evaluators are individuals who have the expertise to perform usability inspections. Typically, they are user researchers or designers who work on the product. In reality, it's not possible to find an unbiased evaluator, because we all are humans, after all.

Regardless of evaluators' skills and experience, their opinions can still be skewed by their own biases. Another issue is that they're not typical users of the product, which means that their simulated experience isn't 100% accurate.

Companies can involve several independent evaluators to receive a more comprehensive evaluation.

Documenting your testing is as essential as planning. First, it keeps things recorded so you can refer to them at any time and share them with other team members. Second, documented insights and notes may provide some food for thought at later iterations. Third, documenting allows everyone to follow the track of the inspection flow.

For example, if you conduct a heuristic evaluation, document the following:

• Wireframe name or UI element
• Violated usability heuristic
• The issue's severity
• Recommendations on how things can be improved

You'll also need this information for formulating the final report on usability inspection findings.

A usability inspection report is the icing on the cake of the whole testing process. It represents all findings and insights and allows stakeholders and team members to see all the hard work you've done.

Essentially, the final report should describe the usability problems you found and how they affect UX. Also, it should provide helpful recommendations on what can be improved and how. The report motivates the team to apply recommendations as soon as possible.