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When hiring a usability specialist (whether in-house, as a consultant, or by selecting among contractors who have bid on your Statement of Work), it is important to review the individual specialist’s skills and background to ensure that you select a qualified expert.

What to ask

Begin by reviewing the usability specialist’s experience, including:

• past performance
• current list of clients
• variety of project work
• education
• references

Here are some topics and questions to ask prospective consultants:

Client work

• Who are your current clients?
• How long have you worked for these clients?
• Can we contact your current clients for references?
• What types of projects have you worked on?
• What was your role in each project?
• What was the outcome or result of the project?

Range of usability skills

• What types of services do you offer?
• Do you conduct user research?
• What do you consider user research?
• What types of user research do you do?
• Do you do user and task analysis?
• Do you assist organizations in setting measurable usability goals?
• Do you provide writing for the Web services?
• Do you have skills in information architecture?
• Can you create wireframes of the Web site for our design team?
• Can you provide usability training for our internal team?

Usability testing methodology

• At what point in the process do you suggest we conduct usability testing?
• How many rounds of usability testing do you recommend?
• How many users do you test with?
• How do you recruit users for a usability test?
• Where do you recommend we conduct our usability tests?
• What type of equipment do you use to conduct a usability test?
• Do you recommend remote usability testing?
• Do you have the equipment to conduct remote tests?
• What types of metrics do you capture during a usability test?
• How do you use these metrics?
• How do you report the results of the usability test?
• Do you provide research-based recommendations?
• Do you provide video clips with your usability report?
• Do you provide on-going consultation to assist design teams in implementing the results?

Where to look for consultants

• If you are in a government agency, look at the GSA schedule.
  GSA Schedules e-Library, Information Technology Services
  (General Services Administration)
  This is GSA’s list of numerous information technology, including usability testing, vendors. To find usability and human factors vendors and specialists, you can browse the list or conduct a search.
• Ask others who have hired usability consultants.
• Look at lists from professional societies.

You can find lists of usability consultants at the Web sites of at least three professional societies. (Note that our linking to these lists does not imply an endorsement of any specific consultant or list.)

• HCI Consultants
  (Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction)
  The HCI consultants list is a free service to the HCI community. The listing is free for any consultant who appears to be doing work related to HCI.
• Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES)
  The directory contains listings created by HFES Full Members in good standing who have paid a fee to promote their services.
• Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA)
  The Consultant Directory is published as a service to those seeking a usability professional for their project.  A listing in this directory is on a fee-paid basis.

Next steps

When you have a usability specialist on board, if you have assembled your project team, you are ready to hold a kick-off meeting.

If you need outside help with the user-centered design process or with specific usability activities, you will need to prepare a Request for Quotation (RFQ) which includes a Statement of Work (SOW).

An SOW describes the work to be performed and usually includes a timeline and level of effort so that a vendor or contractor can respond to the RFQ with a proposal and cost estimate. You can then select the most qualified help at the most affordable cost.

SOWs should include the following:

• work to be performed
• location of the work
• period of performance and timeline
• deliverable schedule
• any special requirements (such as security clearances, travel required, special skills or knowledge)

The evaluation criteria may include:

• the bidder’s plan for performing the work
• the skills and experience of the individuals who are proposed for the work
• the past performance and other projects that the company has completed
• price

To help you issue a contract or task order for usability support, we have provided some sample SOWs:

• Usability Statement of Work (DOC - 93KB)
  • evaluation of current sites
  • user research and analysis
  • user and task analysis
  • information architecture and content organization
  • iterative usability testing

Sample SOW covers a range of user-centered design activities, including:

• Usability and Focus Group Participant Recruitment (DOC - 36KB)
  Sample SOW on usability and focus group recruitment.
• Web Usability Consulting (DOC - 42KB)
  Sample SOW for acquiring usability analysis and testing.
• Web Usability Testing (DOC - 48KB)
  Sample SOW for acquiring usability testing and documenting lessons learned.

Next steps

As you review responses to your Statement of Work, you may find useful questions to think about in our article on Hire a Usability Specialist.

Once you have your usability expert(s) on board, you may be ready to Hold a Kick-Off Meeting.

Create a plan

Planning is a way to understand and get agreement on what you are going to do, in what timeframe, with what resources, and at what cost.

By including usability activities in your project plan, you build in the time and resources to carry out those activities. By reviewing the Step-by-Step Usability Guide, you can better understand which fit with your needs so you can put them in appropriately in your plan.

As you begin to plan, think about and get agreement on

• Scope - What are you developing? What is the Web site going to cover? About how many pages will it be?
• Audiences - Who are the major groups you want the site to serve?
• Objectives - What goals should the Web site help your agency or organization to meet?

We provide a brief introduction to these three topics here. More detailed questions to think about are in the article on Hold a Kick-Off Meeting.

Determine project scope

Are you creating a Web site for an entire agency or organization? Part of that agency or organization? On a particular topic? For a particular audience?

You should be able to name the Web site and write a short description of it.

You should also understand the requirements of your Web site. To learn more, see the article on how to Determine Web Site Requirements.

Identify user audiences

List all the different groups that you want to use the site. For example:

• general public
• researchers
• advocates
• students

Also, think about these users’ needs. For example, for many different user groups coming to Web sites, you might want to remember that:

• Users are very busy.
• Users don’t want to read very much.
• Users want to get tasks done as quickly as possible.
• Users may not know a lot of your technical vocabulary.

You may want to learn a lot more about your users. See the articles on Evaluate Your Current Site, Learn About Your Users, and Conduct Task Analysis.

Set objectives

What does your agency or organization want to achieve by having a Web site? You may start by saying “give information,” and that’s fine, but you should also think about your objectives in business terms.

For example, do you want users to get the answers to their own questions without calling the agency? If so, you might have an objective of reducing phone calls by X amount, saving Y dollars.

You can set similar measurable objectives for reducing emails, for increasing customer satisfaction, for increasing subscriptions to online newsletters, and so on. When you set meaningful measurable objectives, you have ways of measuring success after the site is launched.

The list of agency objectives are different from two other types of goals that you should also understand and set as part of a user-centered design process. The others are:

• your users’ goals (These are their scenarios, what they come to the Web site to achieve.) See the articles on Evaluate Your Current Site, Conduct Task Analysis, and Write Scenarios.
• measurable usability goals for users’ scenarios (These are the ways you will tell whether your site is effective, efficient, and satisfying to your users.) See Set Measurable Usability Goals.

Next steps

Another part of your plan is to think about the people who will work on the project. You may want to look at the article on Assemble a Project Team.

What are the Guidelines?

Throughout your Web design or redesign project, you should take advantage of what is already known about best practices for each step of the process. The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, compiled through an extensive process of research and review, bring you those best practices.

This article gives you background information on the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines.

Many topics

The guidelines cover:

• design process and evaluation (PDF - 883KB)
• optimizing the user experience (PDF - 5.3MB)
• accessibility (PDF - 856KB)
• hardware and software (PDF - 880KB)
• the homepage (PDF - 4.8MB)
• page layout (PDF - 4.7MB)
• navigation (PDF - 2.7MB)
• scrolling and paging (PDF - 508KB)
• headings, titles, and labels (PDF - 1.9MB)
• links (PDF - 3.9MB)
• text appearance (PDF - 954KB)
• lists (PDF - 428KB)
• screen-based controls (widgets) (PDF - 2.1MB)
• graphics, images, and multimedia (PDF - 971KB)
• writing Web content (PDF - 2.5MB)
• content organization (PDF - 788KB)
• search (PDF - 383KB)
• usability testing (PDF - 1MB)

Guideline, comments, example, references

Each guideline includes:

• a statement of the guideline
• comments (an explanation)
• an example
• sources (references to relevant research)
• a five-point scale of relative importance
• a five-point scale of strength of evidence

Who should use the Guidelines?

The Guidelines offer benefits to four key audiences: Designers, Usability Specialists, Managers, and Researchers.

Designers

Designers—especially those new to the field—can see the range of issues that they must consider when planning and designing a Web site. Relying on evidence-based guidelines is better than relying on individual opinions that are not substantiated by evidence from research or from usability testing. When team members disagree, they can turn to the Guidelines for evidence-based decisions rather than arguing for personal preferences.

Usability Specialists

The Guidelines help usability specialists evaluate the designs of Web sites and support their recommendations. For example, usability specialists can use the Guidelines as a checklist to aid them during their review of Web sites. Usability specialists can also create customized checklists that focus on the “relative importance” and “strength of evidence” scales. For example, a usability specialist could create a checklist that only focuses on the 25 issues that scored highest for relative importance.

Managers

The Guidelines provide managers with a good overview and deep understanding of the wide range of usability and Web design issues that designers may encounter when creating Web sites. The Guidelines also provide managers with a “standard of usability” for their designers. Managers can request that designers follow relevant portions of the Guidelines and can use the Guidelines to set priorities. For example, when rapid design is required, managers can identify the guidelines that are most important to the success of a Web site—as defined by the “relative importance” score associated with each guideline—and require designers to focus on implementing those selected guidelines.

Researchers

Researchers involved in evaluating Web design and Web process issues can use this set of guidelines to determine where new research is needed. Researchers can use the sources of evidence provided for each guideline to assess the research that has been conducted and to determine the need for additional research to increase the validity of the previous findings, or to challenge those findings. Perhaps more importantly, researchers also can use the Guidelines and their sources to formulate new and important research questions.

Can I customize the Guidelines?

You can customize the Guidelines to meet your needs. For example:

• If you were developing a portal Web site that focuses only on linking to other Web sites, you would probably focus on the guidelines in the “Links” and “Navigation” chapters.
• You can merge selected guidelines with your organization’s other standards and guidelines to reduce the number of different documents that designers must look at.

Do the Guidelines have limitations?

The Guidelines apply primarily to English language Web sites designed for most people between 18 and 75 years of age. The Guidelines may not be applicable to all audiences or contexts. Furthermore, they are guidelines, not fixed rules.

They may not apply to Web sites used by audiences with low literacy skills who have special terminology and layout needs.

A designer may have research evidence, usability testing evidence, or specialized knowledge about designing for a particular audience or context that requires adapting a guideline to that audience or context.

Although considerable effort has been made to base the guidelines on research from a variety of fields, including cognitive psychology, computer science, human factors, technical communication, and usability; other disciplines may have valuable research that is not reflected in these guidelines.

Some strength of evidence ratings are low because there is a lack of research for that particular issue. The strength of evidence scale was designed to value research-based evidence and also to acknowledge experience-based evidence including expert opinion. Low strength of evidence ratings should encourage research on those issues.

Next steps

When you have thought about the process and considered the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, you should Develop a Plan.

During the kick-off meeting, you begin to develop an understanding of how your internal team views the current Web site and the project to develop a new site. It is important to understand internal perceptions of the scope, vision, goals, users, and content in order to work out any differences within the team and to move everyone into the same plan for your new site.

A very important part of this understanding is to see:

• who your team members think of as the audiences
• what they think are the users’ main scenarios
• how well they think the current site meets the audiences’ needs

As you Evaluate Your Current Site, Learn About Your Users, and Conduct Task Analysis, you will want to consider any differences between what you find and what your team thinks. If reality is different from what the team thinks, it is critical to make sure the team understands what you learn and adjusts its plans to match the realities.

You can download Questions to Ask at Kick-Off-Meetings (DOC - 157KB) (PDF - 33KB) to help you learn how your internal team percieves the site and its users.

Next steps

Different action items for different people may come out of the kick-off meeting. A few of the action items should definitely be to Evaluate Your Current Site and to Learn More About Your Users.

To ensure that your project goes smoothly and is successful, you must assemble a project team with the right mix of skills.

How many people you need depends, of course, on the scope of your project. You may find that one person has the skills to fill more than one of the roles we list below or you may need several people for some of these roles.

Some of the skill sets or roles you need to fill, include:

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Next steps

If you do not have all these skills in-house, you may want to get outside help. For help in hiring usability skills, consult the articles on Write a Statement of Work (SOW) and Hire a Usability Specialist.

Once you have all the team members assembled, you are ready to Hold a Kick-Off Meeting.