The UX Audit - A Guide to Improving your Website
A UX audit or review is a process where an experienced UX expert gathers various forms of data, insights, and business metrics. Using this information they can then evaluate the user experience quality of a website, app, or other digital platform, making recommendations based on real data and expert knowledge. The ultimate goal of the review is to optimise the website using these data-driven recommendations.
When Should We Conduct A UX Audit?
Think about a UX audit as a health check, it can be performed at any point of your digital product’s existence, as and when needed. An audit is an approach that can be vital in discovering any potential usability, content or design issues.
Examples of these might include:
- Images missing alt text; this can compromise accessibility
- Inconsistent typography usage
- Conflicting branding or colours
- Content that is outdated
- A cluttered layout
- Missing navigation items
These issues can be revealed along with many other areas of concern that might need improvement.
With the findings gathered from a UX audit, we can further explore optimising the digital product, using additional methods such as A/B testing, performance testing, usability testing or analytics.
How Do We Conduct A UX Audit?
At Amazee Labs, UX audits are usually performed by one or two UX designers, the process is also called a ‘cognitive walk-through’, where the UX expert essentially goes through the website page by page using a process called a heuristic evaluation - any potential room for improvement or optimisation is recorded. This evaluation process is conducted according to a set of six design principles created by the renowned usability authors Don Norman and Jakob Nielson.
These principles include:
- Visibility – This refers to the visibility of functions and how easy they are to find. The more noticeable they are, the more likely users will know what to do next.
- Feedback – Every action needs a reaction. There needs to be some indication, like a sound, a moving dial, a spinning rainbow wheel, that the user’s action caused something.
- Constraints – This refers to an aspect of the design that constrains, or restricts a user from performing a certain action.
- Mapping – Mapping is the relationship between control and effect. The idea is that with good design, the controls to something will closely resemble what they affect.
- Consistency – The same action has to cause the same reaction, every time. It’s also important that the design feels cohesive, enhancing brand integrity.
- Affordance – Affordance is the relationship between what something looks like and how it's used.
The heuristic evaluation is performed using a set of guidelines and populating a checklist which is based on the aforementioned design principles as well as other specialist criteria. These findings along with an extensive UI and Usability analysis are consolidated and showcased in a report.
The report comprises four parts:
- The heuristics conclusion based on the checklist
- The UI and Usability review which includes any fields of improvement and necessary optimisation
- Test results described in detail highlighting the main pain points and potential areas for improvement
- Recommendations that could improve the overall usability and maximise ROI
