How Do You Conduct A UX Audit?
Step-By-Step Guide To Conducting An Effective UX Audit
If your website, app or other digital product is not performing the way it should be or is encountering issues, a UX audit will take you through a series of steps to help you determine why.
The purpose of a UX audit is to provide hard data that explains why a product is encountering problems. It provides actionable recommendations that will eliminate these issues and improve the user experience.
The steps included in a UX audit will vary depending on the time and budget allotted to the project. Some audits will only last a day or two, while others can last several weeks.
Here is an outline of how to conduct a UX audit step by step:
1. Understand Business Objectives
The first step in conducting a UX audit is to understand the businesses’ goals for the product being audited. This will mean different things depending on the client. For example, if you are auditing an ecommerce solution, you may want to align the purpose of your audit with business goals like ‘increasing conversions’ or ‘increase cross-selling’.
One of the most useful ways to understand a businesses’ objectives is to conduct stakeholder interviews with individuals at the company who have a genuine interest in the product or the objectives in question. This can include product managers, developers, marketers, salespeople or customer service representatives. Each interview should gather information about the positives and negatives of the product. The aim is to find out what the product should do to improve the business.
The goal of these interviews is to gain a nuanced understanding of the company’s goals. Objectives need to be unpacked and clearly defined. The findings from this stage of the audit should be shared with your client or employer to make sure they agree with the business objectives you outline.
2. Get To Know Your Users
The next step in a UX audit is to get to know your users. You can do this by creating user personas. These user personas are fictional users that help the UX team and the business better understand their customers.
Here are a few handy ways to gather information about your users:
- Surveys
- Stakeholder interviews
- Interviews with the products’ end users
The aim of these steps is to present a user with the product and find out about their unique experience. This information can be used to come up with a series of personas which represent the kinds of people who utilise the digital product.
3. Understand User Objectives and Create Flows
The information gathered by getting to know your users should then be turned into user flows. These user flows will establish the user’s objectives in different parts of the product and describe the steps they’ll take to get there. This process should also identify where the user might encounter difficulties .
Although these user flows will mainly arise from the user personas, they should also be based on the information gathered about the users’ objectives from stakeholder interviews, user surveys and interviews.
We recommend bringing these user flows to life in journey diagrams, giving a step-by-step breakdown of the user, their motivations and the user flow you expect them to take. Check out a great run down from the Nielsen Norman Group on creating your own journey map.
4. Review Analytics
Most businesses track the performance of their website and mobile products using Google Analytics. This data is invaluable during a UX audit because it provides indisputable, quantitative data about who is interacting with the product.
Regardless of what analytics are gathered, you should ensure the information covers enough time to establish trends in how the product is used over time.
With this information to hand, you can identify problem areas that are presenting poor metrics and develop recommendations in step 6 that have been validated by real data.
5. Complete a Heuristic Evaluation
The heuristic evaluation is another important task in a UX audit. UX designers know there are usability heuristics all digital products should follow to make them more user friendly.
During a heuristic evaluation, you need to take what you’ve learnt from creating user personas and user objectives to go through the product as if you are the user. Try to see things from the user’s point of view as you try to accomplish a series of tasks that will meet their objectives. Remember to take notes and screenshots detailing each and every challenge or pain point encountered. If more than one person is working on the audit, make sure everyone goes through this step to gather as much data as possible.
6. Compile Findings and Make Recommendations
Finally, you should always end your UX audit by compiling your findings and making recommendations to the client or wider team. Once all of the data has been collected, it should be analysed for insights into how the product is being used, pinpointing where users run into any difficulties. This information should then be condensed into a document that clearly and concisely conveys your findings to the client.
Make sure to provide the client with a series of actionable recommendations. It should be clear how each recommendation can be implemented and what it will do to help meet business and user objectives. For example, if you find that users are having difficulty locating an important piece of information, you might want to recommend placing a link to the information on the home screen.
Here are some effective ways to represent your findings:
- Site maps
- Wireframes
- Prototypes
- Heatmaps and screen recordings
- Charts and graphs for metric performance
- Other visual means
Try to avoid being overly critical and instead focus on the positives by providing solutions for improvement.