Interview with Raphaël Yharrassarry - The Role of Expert Evaluations in Teaching - Capian Expert Series

In this interview, Raphaël Yharrassarry talks to us about UX expert reviews in professional training and implementation. Raphaël is an ergonomist and psychologist. He is the co-creator and former head of the Master of UX Design of the École Multimédia. You can follow him on his Bloc Notes UX or on Twitter. Thanks, Raphaël!

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

Interview translation

What is the role of expert evaluations in teaching?

I use expert reviews during training. I often start with them and give my students the criteria of Bastien & Scapin to try and help them understand how to classify ergonomic problems and then I’ll give them a site to review. There are sites that work well for that, for example institutional sites with some weird quirks, with little ergonomic problems all over the place. Even if they’re not experts yet when they’re in training, doing an evaluation like that allows them to identify the ergonomic problems, to be aware that, even in a site that seems to work well, there will always be problems that appear. Even with sites that have a lot of issues, the evaluation helps the students to be aware of the problems and how to categorize them. So the advantage of categorizing them is that is helps to come up with solutions. Typically, when I have students, once they can successfully categorize the problems, they can redesign a new version of the site.

What do you use expert evaluations for in your own work?

Professionally speaking, I often use all aspects of an audit when I begin a project with a pre-existing site. It’s a way for me to get a big-picture sense of the potential usability issues.