Interview with Franck Ferront – Using Tools for Expert Evaluations

In this interview, Franck Ferront discusses his interest in expert evaluations for client assignments and the importance of continually involve users. Franck is an expert in user experience and UX coach with UXpérience. You can follow him on Twitter. Thanks, Franck!

In this series, we interview UX professionals about the importance of usability, ergonomic, and expert evaluations.

Interview translation

What’s the Interest in Expert Evaluations for Consulting Assignments?

My interest in using a tool for expert evaluations is that I can formalize the results and produce them rapidly. You can structure responses and documentation that will be sent to a client or project team with whom you’re working. It’s very practical, very fast, and very effective.

What is the benefit of using expert evaluations before user testing?

To make expert assessments, you need to start off by checking the interface or the product you’re evaluating and to check it you need to lead a heuristic evaluation based on criteria to identify problems, after which you can start test protocol. It’s essential to do it before the heuristic evaluations and expert assessments in order to write the test protocol and then start with user testing.

How do expert reviews help to structure your work?

I think you need to be careful with heuristic assessments and expert evaluations because the risk is that, in terms of competence for the UX designer, if he provides too much content without having a user to reference, he risks being confronted with a problem later on – having to justify his need for having access to users. So it’s always important to correctly structure our evaluation references, but you always need to be careful to see how the client reacts to the results you give them and that they don’t take it is a be-all-end-all solution. You can’t only complete an assessment and report only problems, but you also need to supply answers and solutions. So the advantage of structuring problems is that you can suggest the best-possible solutions. It’s so important to offer solutions when you’re confronting your client with issues.