Suppose you have started a new online store that sells organic products. After the launch, many users visit your website and go through it, looking for health products that suit them. They add one or more products to their cart and leave after getting to the checkout page. And you start to think about where you went wrong or forgot to guide the users properly. A UX audit can help you fix users' problems with your app or website.
A UX audit, also known as a UX review, assesses the entire user experience design of a product. It allows businesses to figure out the flaws in their UX and rectify them.
It includes testing and analyzing various components and metrics like:
After a design audit is complete, the auditors put together a report that contains findings and actionable recommendations, which are used to fix or optimize a product.
A UX audit involves several steps for evaluating a product. Each step requires sufficient information, so everyone on the auditing team has a clear vision of what to expect from the review.
Preparing for an audit requires:
First, one must be familiar with the business objectives. You can interview the company stakeholders and individuals from different teams to grasp the product and the company's business goals.
These are fictional personas created by the design team that represents people who might use the product. It helps designers make the product more user-centric by determining the users' wants and needs. For more insight, it is advisable to directly interview the users to understand the pain points in a product from their perspective.
Heuristics are a quick and easy way to find out what parts of the interface are facing problems and how to fix them. So it's necessary to select the correct heuristics before a UX evaluation to pinpoint the exact cause of interference.
The performance data also gives valuable insight into how the product is faring in the market and its reported shortcomings and helps predict its future potential.
Take notes or screenshots whenever you flag an issue in the UX. Keeping records ensures you remember and describe the problems in detail in the report to the clients and stakeholders.
Much data is collected during an audit, like metrics, notes, images, etc. Organize all the analytics data in a spreadsheet and save all the screenshots in cloud storage to analyze the metrics better.
Give actionable recommendations to the stakeholders in the report so they can fix the identified problems. These actions must be based on real insight, not guesses or assumptions.
Accuracy is vital, whether selecting heuristics for your interface or identifying UX issues. Describe the problem, location, and recommendations as correctly as possible in the audit report.
Classify various UX issues into low, medium, and high categories to mark their importance to the stakeholders. This way, one can identify areas of concern and deal with them efficiently.
Auditing solves a majority of UX issues but not all of them. To ensure that the products align with UX and business goals, it is crucial to conduct regular design audits from time to time. A clear UX strategy with pre-determined objectives, benchmarks & KPIs to measure against is a must if you’re auditing for the first time.
If you wish to learn about the UX review process, tools, and outcomes, check out the UX Audit course on ProApp. Happy Learning!
Rajat is an industry veteran with 10+ years of expertise in the Design industry. He is a software engineer by education who successfully and profitably runs a Digital Design Agency as the CEO at ProCreator for 6+ years. He has trained more than 100 designers and scaled his bootstrapped business to a team of 50. He takes care of product thinking and leads the strategies at ProApp.