At icapps, our UX designers can provide valuable insights into the usability of your digital products by conducting a UX audit. In a UX audit, we analyze if your product follows the industry’s best practices. After a thorough review of your product, we can prioritize the areas for improvement and provide helpful recommendations.
1. Determine the audit's scope
Before we start our audit, we have to determine the scope. First, we must know the product or the project we are reviewing. State the goal of the project and know the target audience. Next, discuss with the client what the goals of this audit will be. This can differ for each product and the phase they are in. For example, we can conduct an audit to optimize the overall navigation of a website or just one specific feature. We can conduct an audit in a prototyping phase to waterproof the concept before it goes into development, or we can finetune an already existing product to perfection.
2. Get familiar with the most important UX heuristics
At icapps, we formulated 10 main UX heuristics. In an audit, we search for areas in the client’s product that don’t match these heuristics. This way, we can determine the areas for improvement. These are the heuristics we use:
Visibility of system status
Match between system and the real world
User control and freedom
Consistency and standards
Error prevention
Recognition rather than recall
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Aesthetic and minimal design
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Help and documentation
To really get what these heuristics are about, check out our UX audit template.
Next to these 10 main UX heuristics, we also provide conversion boosters for audits to increase conversion.
3. Analyze & Document
Before you start analyzing, write down which version of the product you are using, on which operating system, device, and, if relevant, in which browser. Try to group features in different user flows and start analyzing the product flow by flow.
Scan every page and feature within each flow and look for things that don’t match the main heuristics. If you find an area for improvement, you can document this in the report. Do this by providing the underlying heuristic, some comments, and a screenshot. Next up, you can research best practices and give recommendations on how to improve. Lastly, it can be helpful for the client to determine the priority of fixing this issue. To decide if the area for improvement has high, medium, or low priority, you can refer to the scope you determined in step one.
Present all areas for improvement in the order of their priority. Frame all high-priority issues on the first page. Next, tackle all medium priorities and end the overview with the nice-to-haves.
4. Go the extra mile
For websites, we can also provide insights into the performance and accessibility stats. To check the performance of a website, we use Google pagespeed insights. This tool provides a score from 0 to 100. If the website scores below average, we can recommend a performance audit to determine what causes these issues.
To check the accessibility of a website, we use Lighthouse Accessibility to generate a report. If the results are below average, we can recommend a full accessibility review to determine what causes the bad results.
For mobile apps, we can check how well your app is ranked in its appropriate categories in the Apple App Store or the Google Playstore. To analyze and improve the ranking, we use AppTweak.
5. Present your UX audit findings and determine the next steps
Schedule a meeting with your client to present your UX findings and recommendations. Make clear what the most important findings and recommendations are for their product. Discuss with your client what the next steps should be. Depending on the findings, the client’s budget, and technical possibilities, these next steps could come in different shapes. For example, some products can benefit from some quick fixes while some require a complete redesign.
