Introducing our UX Health Check

It should come as no surprise that we at reinteractive are strong advocates of providing engaging and delightful user experiences. To achieve this, we like to allocate some of our time on a project just to research - getting to know the idea behind the system to be built, getting to know the target audience and getting to know the opportunities and challenges of the environment where the new system will live. Other times, we craft delightful user experiences for existing projects by tweaking the interaction within a project and the visual elements of it until everything connects seamlessly. Sometimes we make small, inexpensive improvements because that’s all the budget allows. While we are strong advocates of the User-Centered Design Process, we realise that sometimes there just isn’t enough budget for a full-on UX overhaul.

This is why we created our newest intro service - the UX Health Check. The UX Health Check joins the lineup of intro services started by the App Health Check and offers a quick and inexpensive usability review of an existing system - webpage, web app, mobile app or even just wireframes of a new idea. Our UX and Design experts conduct the review by clicking around, exploring the application and gathering impressions as we go. We do this with UX best practices, so called heuristics in mind. Once we’ve identified the problems that violate heuristics, cause confusion, or seem to be outright bad - we rank them (and colour-code them, we like colours!) on a scale of 1-4, as follows:

green Best Practice - this means that, while the current system is usable and functional as is, there are improvements that could be made to comply with standard usability guidelines.

yellow Minor Issue - this is something that may cause some frustration to some users but it isn’t a serious matter that needs to be addressed immediately.

orange Serious Issue - this is an issue that is ideally addressed as soon as possible as it impacts user experience in a significant way for most users.

red Critical Issue - this is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately as it severely affects the usability of that particular area of the system.

The end result is a page-by-page review of the application that can be used to identify and correct some issues. Keep in mind though - while we are very good at what we do and draw on years of experience in the field - we are not your users or your target market. The UX Health Check report is only a guideline, meant to identify issues that can be fixed with minimal effort, not a set of rules.