This article outlines the factors that should be considered before beginning a UX audit to make the process as efficient and effective as possible.
What is a UX audit?
A UX audit assesses the user experience of a digital product. A holistic understanding of the digital product’s performance is gathered using various methods, including a UX maturity survey, user observations, expert heuristic evaluation and proto-persona creation. This helps to identify how well your product meets user needs and your organisation’s objectives. Our UX audit’s final output is a report comprising findings from across activities and providing actionable recommendations to improve your user experience.
Preparing for a UX audit
This article will cover what’s required when preparing for a UX audit. Preparing for a UX audit is an important step, but it doesn’t have to be burdensome. Through our UX audit process, we support and guide our clients through the following steps to ensure the UX audit is as effective as possible.
- Define organisation goals: It’s important to consider why you want to conduct the UX audit and what you hope to achieve. This helps frame the focus of the following activities. For example, you may have seen a drop-off at the checkout and want to increase conversion rates by x%.
- Determine who should be involved: Before conducting any UX audit activities, you need to identify your team. We recommend you create a core team of three to five stakeholders who will be involved throughout and play the role of decision-makers. Beyond this, involving a broader group to be consulted and provide input at certain audit stages is a good idea. For example, broadening the group for the stakeholder workshop to include representatives from a cross-section of teams, technical teams, and those that are customer-facing can provide vital insight.
- Set a budget, resources and timelines: These project management aspects are essential to ensure commitment and expectations are aligned. If there are any key milestones which must be hit or important timings in your organisation’s calendar year, these should be surfaced before starting the project.
- Identifying users: One of the most common timeline variables is the completion of user observations. It is essential to take the time upfront to discuss how users will be recruited for the research sessions. Recruitment can be done in several ways: an onsite survey, reaching out to costumes through sales teams, social media outreach or a recruitment partner. In the early stages of the UX audit process, we conduct a stakeholder workshop, during which we work with stakeholders to define target audiences; this then guides who should be invited to research sessions.
Conclusion
Completing these initial preparatory tasks can kick-start your UX audit process and avoid unnecessary delays. To find out more about our UX audit process, get in touch.
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