66 Chapter 3 Big U and little u usability 4. Now look at it (now that you've had a chance to use it). Think about relationship, conversation, interaction, and appearance. Relationship : How did user goals and business goals align? Conversation : Were headings and text helpful and informative? Interaction : Could the user find a good "first click" or know how to use an interactive feature? Appearance : Did the visual design help or hinder? 5. Report What are the problems you saw? Find at least one positive point. In the end, whatever approach you take to a product's inspection will provide you with a set of findings or issues that can affect usability. If you've never done an inspection before, it can help to start with a set of heuristics. Once you get comfortable with what you're looking for, guidelines tend to become internalized, and you can then do away with them. Comparing the results from heuristic evaluation and usability testing What if you have a small budget and you need to choose only one of these two top methods? First, you should try to persuade those making this request to let you do both by taking the budget you have and dividing it into two parts: a small heuristic evaluation (or expert review) and a small usability study. See Nielsen and Mack, Eds., Usability Inspection Methods , 1994. If you can't make the case for both and you have to choose, here's what the research tells us about the two methods: No inspection method predicts end-user problems as well as actual usability testing. Usability experts doing an inspection are better at identifying the most severe errors, compared to developers or nonexperts.