Summary

Drawing on our extensive experience in researching usability and developing guidelines, the review focuses on three areas:

• Are your guidelines correct or should they be modified to better match what's known about usability? It's not so common that a guideline is completely wrong, but we often find that guidelines have to be modified to handle special cases or issues that were overlooked by the original author.
• Did you overlook guidelines or principles that ought to be included in your document for completeness?
• Is the presentation clear and convincing? Having the correct advice is not enough. Readers also need to understand the advice and agree that it will be advantageous to comply.

The price for these reviews varies considerably, depending on the magnitude and complexity of the document. Page count is not the only consideration.

Please send us a draft of your document (or at least a draft table of contents), and we can quote you a price for the review.

Who Should Purchase?

• Intranets in big companies where several different departments contribute content or applications to a (hoped-for) unified user experience for the employees.
• Corporate websites that have to cover multiple product lines or a large number of pages managed by different groups and possibly even outsourced to multiple design agencies.
• Technology platforms such as operating systems, programming environments, PDAs, or middleware where independent software vendors or systems integrators are responsible for the end-user experience that your customers will ultimately use to judge you.

In all these cases, usability is highly dependent on coordinating the work of a large number of designers and developers. More and more companies are addressing this problem by developing their own usability guidelines or user interface standards to improve the quality and consistency of the various design components.

If you ask hundreds or thousands of designers to follow your guidelines or standards, you had better make sure that they are the right ones. The investment in an independent quality assurance process is easily recovered in terms of a better document and thus better user interfaces.

Besides being better, your guidelines or standards will also have higher credibility when you can say that they have been reviewed by the world's leading usability authority.

Qualifications

Nielsen Norman Group is the world's leading research organization for the discovery and publication of user interface guidelines. We have documented thousands of usability guidelines, ranging from 113 guidelines for homepage design over 46 guidelines for designing for senior citizens to 111 guidelines for intranet design.

Members of our team conducted much of the original research in the 1980s and 1990s on making user interface standards and guidelines easier to apply for designers and developers (some of which was published in our book from 1989, Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency). Even earlier, a member of our team wrote Apple Computer's first human interface guidelines.

Schedule

Availability of our senior staff is highly variable and the turnaround time on the review will be faster, the more advance notice we get.

Deliverable

How to Order

Please contact Nielsen Norman Group at info@nngroup if you would like more information or are interested in this service.