| name | usability-review |
| description | Review an interface against user goals, clarity, feedback, error prevention and recovery, consistency, cognitive load, accessibility, and likely task friction using evidence and realistic flows. |
Usability Review
Use when an existing or proposed interface needs expert usability evaluation before or alongside user testing.
Procedure
- Define target users, critical tasks, environment, constraints, and known research or analytics before reviewing screens.
- Walk each critical flow from a realistic starting point, including loading, empty, error, permission, interruption, and recovery states.
- Evaluate discoverability, terminology, hierarchy, control affordance, feedback, system status, defaults, and whether actions match user expectations.
- Look for unnecessary memory burden, repeated decisions, hidden prerequisites, destructive ambiguity, and places where users must understand implementation concepts.
- Check consistency with existing product patterns unless a deliberate change improves the task.
- Include accessibility and input-method implications where they materially affect usability, while routing formal accessibility conformance to Accessibility Reviewer.
- Rank findings by task impact, frequency, severity, and confidence; distinguish observed evidence from heuristic inference.
- Recommend the smallest design change that addresses the underlying user problem and identify where user research or testing is needed to resolve uncertainty.
Decision rules
- Expert review is not a substitute for watching real users when the risk or uncertainty warrants research.
- Consistency is valuable until the existing pattern itself is the usability problem.
- Do not hide subjective taste inside usability language.
- Error recovery matters as much as happy-path efficiency for consequential tasks.
Quality gate
The review is complete when critical flows and failure states have been examined, findings connect to user-task consequences, evidence and inference are separated, priorities are clear, and recommended changes address causes rather than merely rearranging pixels.
