lesson 5.9 - the review process: suggesting improvements
Master the art of suggesting actionable improvements for a digital user interface in BTEC DIT. Perfect your review process and boost your Component 1 grade!
Welcome to the final step of your Component 1 journey! We have planned, designed, built, and critiqued. Now, it is time to play the role of the expert consultant. Identifying a weakness in a user interface is only half the job; the real magic is knowing exactly how to fix it to make the user experience flawless. Today, we turn problems into powerful solutions!
Learning Outcomes
The Building Blocks (Factual Knowledge)
The Connections and Theories (Conceptual Knowledge)
The Skills and Methods (Procedural Knowledge)
Recall the purpose of suggesting improvements in the digital review process.
Describe how specific design changes can address identified usability weaknesses.
The Connections and Theories (Conceptual Knowledge)
Analyse a user interface to determine where accessibility and usability principles have not been met.
Evaluate the potential impact of a proposed improvement on the end user's experience.
The Skills and Methods (Procedural Knowledge)
Apply constructive feedback to formulate a specific, actionable improvement.
Create a formal improvement proposal that directly links back to the original project constraints and user requirements.
Digital Skill Focus: Focus your efforts today on iterative design thinking and the critical evaluation of digital interfaces to enhance the user experience.
From Flaw to Fix: Suggesting Improvements
So, you have completed your Review Process and found some glaring weaknesses in your user interface design. Excellent work! But pointing out a problem is only step one; a true designer knows how to fix it. This is where we move from criticism to construction by suggesting Actionable Improvements.
What makes an improvement "Actionable"?
An actionable improvement is specific enough that a developer could read it and know exactly what to change without having to guess.
Weak Suggestion: "Make the text easier to read." (Too vague!)
Actionable Improvement: "Increase the body text font size to 14pt and change the font colour to dark grey to improve contrast against the white background."
The Power of Justification
You cannot just change things because you prefer the colour blue. Every improvement in the Iterative Design cycle must have a clear Justification. You need to explain why this change is necessary by linking it directly back to your original planning documents.
When you write your improvement, always tie it to one of these three anchors:
1
User Requirements: Does this fix help the user achieve their main goal faster?
2
Accessibility: Does this fix make the interface usable for people with visual, motor, or cognitive impairments? You can learn more about general usability rules by reading about expert usability guidelines.
3
Usability & Design Principles: Does this fix reduce cognitive load, increase consistency, or speed up the time it takes to complete a task?
Task The UX Consultant Challenge
Welcome to your new job as a Lead UX Consultant! Two clients have come to you with digital products that are frustrating their users. They know there is a problem, but they do not know how to fix it. It is your job to write a formal, justified improvement proposal for each scenario.
1
Get Organised!
Grab a blank document or a piece of paper. Set up two headings: "Client 1: Pedal Power" and "Client 2: Majestic Cinema".
2
Client 1: Pedal Power Cycles Dashboard
The Flaw: The developer has created a beautiful pie chart showing which electric bikes are making a profit and which are making a loss. However, they used pure red for "loss" and pure green for "profit" with no text labels on the slices. The store manager is red-green colourblind and cannot read the chart.
Your Task: Write a 3-sentence actionable improvement explaining exactly how to redesign this chart so the manager can read it. You must justify your change by referring to Accessibility needs.
Need inspiration? Use this search to see how professionals solve this: Accessible Data Visualisation.
3
Client 2: Majestic Cinema App
The Flaw: Users are selecting their tickets and popcorn, but then abandoning the app because they can't figure out how to pay. The "Proceed to Checkout" button is the same size and grey colour as all the standard text, and it is hidden at the very bottom of a long scrolling page.
Your Task: Write a 3-sentence actionable improvement detailing the exact visual and layout changes you would make to this button. You must justify your change by referring to the design goals of Increasing User Attention and Reducing Task Completion Time.
4
AI Review Check
Before you hand in your proposals, check if your tone is right. Use the prompt below to see how an expert explains things clearly.
Act as an expert UX designer. Explain how to write an actionable UI improvement in 50 words. Audience is 15 year old students. Keep the tone encouraging. No jargon. NO intro, NO outro, NO deviation from the topic, NO follow-up questions.
Outcome: Two detailed paragraphs outlining highly specific, technical, and justified interface improvements for the given scenarios.
Application to the Component Sample PSA
The skills you have practiced today are directly applicable to the final evaluative tasks in both of your core components. Let us look at how you will apply them to the specific briefs.
Component 1: Majestic Cinema
For the Majestic Cinema scenario, after developing your interactive mobile app prototype for booking tickets, you must review its success. You will need to suggest actionable improvements just like we did today. If you notice that your 'Facilities & Accessibility' page is too text-heavy, a weak review would simply say "less text". A distinction-level review will suggest "Converting the text-based facility list into a grid of universally recognised icons to reduce cognitive load and improve the speed of task completion for users with lower reading ages or visual impairments."
Component 2: Pedal Power Cycles
In the Pedal Power Cycles scenario, you will build a complex dashboard to visualise electric bike sales. When reviewing your final dashboard, you must evaluate how well it meets the store manager's requirements. If your charts are difficult to read on the manager's laptop screen, you must suggest a specific, actionable improvement. For example, rather than saying "make it clearer", you would suggest "Increasing the whitespace between the bar chart columns and enlarging the axis labels to 14pt sans-serif, ensuring the data is instantly readable without requiring the user to zoom in, thus reducing task completion time."
Out of Lesson Learning
⭐ The Cinema Contrast Check
Imagine the manager of the Majestic Cinema has reviewed your initial design for the 'What's On' screen and noted that the dark grey text on a black background is unreadable for older users. Write a short, actionable improvement proposing a specific colour scheme change. You must justify your choice by explaining how it directly addresses the user requirement of accessibility for visually impaired patrons.
Imagine the manager of the Majestic Cinema has reviewed your initial design for the 'What's On' screen and noted that the dark grey text on a black background is unreadable for older users. Write a short, actionable improvement proposing a specific colour scheme change. You must justify your choice by explaining how it directly addresses the user requirement of accessibility for visually impaired patrons.
⭐⭐ The Pedal Power Progression
Your data dashboard for Pedal Power Cycles currently requires the manager to click through four different drop-down menus just to see the total sales for the month. Write a detailed improvement proposal suggesting a redesign of this interface element. Justify your proposed changes by explaining how they will reduce the time taken to complete the task and decrease the cognitive load on the manager.
Your data dashboard for Pedal Power Cycles currently requires the manager to click through four different drop-down menus just to see the total sales for the month. Write a detailed improvement proposal suggesting a redesign of this interface element. Justify your proposed changes by explaining how they will reduce the time taken to complete the task and decrease the cognitive load on the manager.
⭐⭐⭐ The Interactive Integration Pitch
The Majestic Cinema app currently has a static map showing the layout of the screens, which users find confusing. Propose an actionable improvement that replaces this static map with an interactive, simulated component using prototyping software. Describe exactly how this new feature will function, what the user will click, and justify why this specific interactive element will increase user confidence and reduce the need for specialised knowledge when navigating the physical cinema building.
The Majestic Cinema app currently has a static map showing the layout of the screens, which users find confusing. Propose an actionable improvement that replaces this static map with an interactive, simulated component using prototyping software. Describe exactly how this new feature will function, what the user will click, and justify why this specific interactive element will increase user confidence and reduce the need for specialised knowledge when navigating the physical cinema building.
Last modified: May 15th, 2026
