What does it mean to conduct experience reviews
An experience review is a fast, flexible, and low-cost method for testing the things you build. You can review a form, document, web page, process — anything constituents use or read. Experience reviews help teams understand what it's like for real people to use their work.
You’ll do experience reviews with your own staff. You won't be recruiting participants like you would in a usability study. There are different types of experience reviews, and you can choose methods that work for you. Here are 3 types:
- Scenario walkthrough: You and your team will pretend to be someone who uses your content and “walk through” a common scenario. For example, you might try to complete a form, use a benefits calculator, or learn how to do something. Along the way, you’ll note where you get stuck or what’s confusing.
- Plain language review: Focuses on whether writing communicates information effectively. This includes:
- Helping audiences understand jargon
- Making sentences more efficient
- Improving document design with bullets, better headings, and shorter paragraphs
- Accessibility reviews: You’ll make sure your content is accessible for everyone. For example, you’ll check:
- How it appears for people using screen readers and mobile phones
- That color contrasts are high enough
- That files pass accessibility checks
Sample stages of designing products and services that could prompt an experience review:
- During early planning or storyboarding to determine viability
- When it’s time to evaluate evolving prototypes
- Before releasing, piloting, or testing new content or features
- Before releasing something to constituents for the first time
Experience reviews are not a substitute for research with real people
Experience reviews aren’t a substitute for testing with actual constituents. If you have the capacity, you should do both experience reviews and user research.
Experience reviews:
- Can quickly surface things needing improvement or further testing
- Are cheaper and faster to do than user research
- Don’t provide as much insight into the actual, lived experiences of people using your project
User research involves recruiting and compensating people to test your products. For example, you might want to watch real constituents use your websites to see if they can do what you want them to do.
Why do it
Regular experience reviews help ground you in your constituents' experiences. Regular reviews also help you continually improve the things you build. You'll be able to catch issues, iterate, and improve before launching a project or feature. Now you're set up to release polished, more trustworthy work.
Experience reviews can also be quick and inexpensive. You can do one in a couple of hours with just 2 people!
What you're aiming for
Your goal is for experience reviews to become a quick, efficient way to plan and release projects. They'll help you iterate more effectively. You’ll also use them to check decisions before starting costly development phases.
To achieve this, experience reviews must become routine. They'll be an essential part of how your team plans and develops projects and initiatives. You’ll have a range of methods to choose from, and you’ll incorporate a broad mix of stakeholders. Your teams will have the training and systems to carry out these reviews quickly and easily.
You’ll also have systems in place for using what you learn in these reviews. They’ll shape your plans and contribute to projects that are more useful, usable, and used.
Finally, experience reviews will help keep your teams' focus on the people they serve. This is essential for all phases of project development.
What you need
To conduct experience reviews, your organization needs:
- An understanding of who will use your product, service, or feature, and what they should be able to do with it
- A way to capture data from the review
Some types of review will be more successful if your team has expertise in that method. For example, to do an accessibility review of a website, it helps to know about web accessibility.
There are many ways to include experience reviews in your processes. You might already be doing them informally. What you do, and how often you do it, depends on staffing and time limitations. You can start small and evolve your use of experience reviews over time.
Getting started
Mass Digital recommends running scenario walkthroughs as your first experience reviews. To do this, you only need a project, 2 team members, and a basic understanding of the project’s audience.
The same project team can run more scenario walkthroughs at regular intervals, even if they’re far apart. One experience review every few months is better than never running one.
Maturing your practice
Maturing your experience review practice means:
- Running them more effectively. For example, for scenario walkthroughs, staff will develop their skill as facilitators, role players, and insight identifiers. It can take practice to imagine the experience of an audience member in a meaningful way.
- Teams include them more frequently during projects’ life cycles. Begin including them at more waypoints, such as feature releases or changes.
- More teams incorporate them into their development processes
- Your organization develops a suite of methods and use cases for executing reviews. For example, you might use one procedure for smaller, less formal reviews. A different procedure may work when a mix of stakeholders is observing or testing a major change.
- Teams begin to feel reviews are valuable rather than an annoying administrative task. This is more likely to happen as they learn to generate useful insights during reviews.
Guidance and resources
Here are a few methods for conducting experience reviews:
- Mass Digital's guide to conducting a basic experience review
- Nielsen Norman Group cognitive walkthrough method to help assess how easily people can learn an interface
- Microsoft’s guide to experience reviews
- The SLICE-B Experience Review Methodology | XM Institute