Consulting
Polish Reviews
You are getting ready to release your product and would like an independent confirmation that it has high quality (and the perception of high quality). In this review, we assume the design is correct (or too late to change), so the goal is to make sure your product is well implemented down to the pixel level—not to redesign.
If your program’s UI lacks polish, users will assume the rest of your program lacks polish too. Why should they assume otherwise?
Scope
While we can review your design to address any specific concerns you have, we recommend looking for polish problems in the following areas:
Consistency problems
- Consistency with standards
- Consistency within features
- Consistency across features
Interaction problems
- Control usage
- Standard interactions (hover, click, right click, double click, drag, mouse wheel, etc.)
- Keyboard (including shortcuts)
- Mouse and pointers
- Error handling
- Forgiveness
- Use of affordance
Visual problems
- Layout, alignment, focus, visual hierarchy
- Control sizing
- Fonts, colors, icons
- Animations and transitions
- Visual glitches
Text problems
- Text clarity
- Text tone
- Grammar, capitalization, punctuation
- Personality
- Clipped or truncated text
- Usefulness of help
Attention to detail
- Appropriate defaults
- Performance and responsiveness
- Unnecessary effort
- Appropriate persistence
- Annoyances
- Support for high DPI, high and low resolution displays
We report everything we find. While arguably any individual polish problem isn’t very significant, the cumulative effect of many polish problems—especially those in the most visible, frequently used areas—can be very significant in the user’s perception of the quality of your product.
Deliverables
A report with an overall impression of the product, along with a complete list of any problems found with their priority and recommended solution. We recommend wrapping the design review with a conference call to discuss the results.
Contact
For more information, please contact consulting@uxdesignedge.com.
