← Back to Website builders
See how it helps
Evaluate usability
Assesses concrete user tasks for discoverability, comprehension and cognitive or motor effort with observable success criteria.
usability-evaluation
Team members using this skill
When is it useful?
Use when a technically working flow still feels confusing.
What does it help you do?
- Walks through realistic scenarios from the user's starting context.
- Examines naming, visual hierarchy, choices and interaction burden.
- Turns findings into testable improvements rather than aesthetic opinions.
Try asking this
Evaluate finding and canceling a subscription, noting where users must guess and how success becomes visible. Start from the account page without knowing the menu structure. Record mistaken turns and whether the final cancellation state and remaining access period are understandable.
Detailed documentation
Read the skill’s original instructions, examples and checks in their authored language.
Show less
Usability Evaluation
Simplification claims must be verifiable. Never assert that a redesign "improves conversion by 40%" without measurement; evaluate interfaces through structured task walkthroughs and observable completion signals.
Workflow
- Run a Cognitive Walkthrough on concrete scenarios:
- Select 2–3 representative user personas (e.g., a first-time user setting up a project, a developer triaging a failed run, an admin reviewing approvals) and walk through the exact steps:
- Will the user know what to do at this step?
- Will the user see the control that does it?
- Will the user recognize from the label that that control matches their goal?
- After clicking, will the user understand from the feedback that progress was made?
- Select 2–3 representative user personas (e.g., a first-time user setting up a project, a developer triaging a failed run, an admin reviewing approvals) and walk through the exact steps:
- Evaluate cognitive, visual, and motor load:
- Visual scan load: How many distinct visual groups, badges, and competing colors fight for attention on the viewport?
- Working-memory load: Does the user have to hold codes, IDs, or previous settings in their head across screens?
- Error-recovery cost: If the user makes a mistake (clicks the wrong filter, submits an invalid field, closes a dialog), how many steps does it take to recover?
- Define observable verification criteria:
- Pair every redesign recommendation with concrete criteria to verify improvement:
- Fewer required decisions or inputs before reaching the core outcome.
- Zero ambiguous or duplicate action labels on the screen.
- Clear recovery path verified on empty, loading, and error states (coordinated with the exploratory QA reviewer
Nova).
- Pair every redesign recommendation with concrete criteria to verify improvement:
Included files 1
SKILL.md