·      Usability testing isn’t the “high-quality gold standard” against which all other methods should be measured. CUE-4 shows that usability testing - just like any other method - overlooks some problems, even critical ones.

·      Expert reviews with highly experienced practitioners can be quite valuable – and, according to this study, comparable to usability tests in the pattern of problems identified – despite their negative reputation.

·      Focus on productivity instead of quantity. In other words, spend your limited evaluation resources wisely. Many of the teams obtained results that could effectively drive an iterative process in less than 25 person-hours. Teams A and L used 18 and 21 hours, respectively, to find more than half of the key problem issues, but with limited reporting requirements. Teams that used five to ten times as many resources did better, but the additional results in no way justified the considerable extra resources. This, of course, depends on the type of product investigated. For a medical device, for example, the additional resources might be justified.

Read more in our “Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE-4)” paper. You can find more information about the paper in the left column.