Quick Rundown of a formal UX Audit
- Copy your URL of an existing public facing site, or
- Copy the share link from your Figma File (make sure its viewable to those with the link.)
- Hire a third party UX Design professional to conduct the Audit. (Third party ensures less bias than internally, or doing it ones’ self.)
- View the UX Audit Report issues
- Read the UX Audit Report Recommendations
- Share with your Engineering and Product Teams.
- Add items to the backlog
DIY UX Audit
If you’re a practicing UX Designer professional you might be wondering how to conduct a UX Audit yourself for a client, or your own portfolio if you’re ambitious.
The first step in conducting a UX Audit has to do with business relationship with your client. You’ve got to ask the right questions to understand what user task is the objective of the audit?
Teams typically have assumptions based upon example competitors or existing product flows. The next level would be to have a map of what that ideal flow might look like. This can serve the UX Auditor well so we can see if the map and the actual prototype, or experience measure up.
Yet, most small business clients don’t have the map. Therefore, we the UX Designers can create one on the fly, while we ask the stakeholders questions. “Where do customers come from?”
“Where do they land?”
“What do they click?” “Then what?”
On and on the inquisitive UX Designer peels back the layers of onion seeking to understand the cognitive flow in the mind of a stakeholder. Thereafter, conducting the audit we have something to compare it against.
Now, that would be all well and good, but sometimes asking all those questions might disturb our clients. They don’t have time. They just want to delegate the task to you. That sort of client merely drops the link, or delivers the brief, and they’re off.
This requires the UX Designer to do a more extensive UX Audit, because there’s now an assumption of more to the experience than a single task flow. Here it’s not unusual to have…
- Returning Customer Flow
- New Customer Flow
- Upgrade Flow
- Cancel Subscription Flow
- Forgot Password Flow
- Delete Account Flow
Underneath each of these sections are likely more edge cases and red routes that may only be surfaced by further research, audit or stakeholder interviews.
There are certain principles, laws, and heuristics that UX Designers abide by as their rubric upon to grade one’s UI Design. These can be found at…
• Laws of UX
• Nielsen Norman Group 10 Heuristics
• GoodUI
• Android Design Principles
• Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good Design
On and on.
Hope you enjoyed this article on how to conduct a UX Audit yourself. Don’t forget a traditional UX Audit is done with 5 experts, so if you’re an army of one, you’re missing 4 members of the audit. This is important for qualitative data statistics. More on that at Measuring U.
Cheers!
