What is a UX review?
A UX review is an analysis of your website that focuses on the User Experience. Primarily the attention is centred on the usability and the main interactions and tasks your users and audience are required to perform. These could be common things like navigating from one page to the next, going through a checkout process or more complex tasks.
Why should you conduct a UX review?
Reviewing your website for improvements is a key part of the website developement strategy and iteration cycle.
It helps to highlight where resources should be best applied and helps to focus efforts on the things that can improve performance, whilst avoiding potentially wasting time and effort on subjective improvements.
Do you have to be an UX expert to conduct a review?
The simple answer to this is no. Although a UX expert will have the knowledge and experience to conduct a high level review, you don’t necessarily need to have the same wisdom in order to discover potential pain points for your users.
Fundamentally these issues are based on common sense. It helps to put yourself in the user’s shoes and think of experiences you’ve had in the past that have frustrated you. If you’re new to UX and usability then a good place to start is to familiarise yourself with Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.
10 tips for conducting your own UX review
1. Think of the target audience and try and empathise with your users.
Ask questions like ‘would this confuse me?’ and ‘how could this have been made easier?’.
2. Focus on the key user journeys and actions. These could be:
• General page navigation
• Sign up processes
• Adding a item to a basket and checking out
3. Keep the 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design in mind.
These are a good resource but remember they are ‘heuristics’ for a reason. They are not definite and strict rules but do act as a solid set of guidelines.
4. Be succinct.
When recording your observations try and make them brief and clear.
5. Illustrate your observations where possible.
Try and provide a screenshot/video to illustrate your point.
6. Always provide a recommended solution to the problem.
Think of potential ideas for how a problem can be solved and record them. Even if you’re not sure, these can still act as good discussion points.
7. Group similar issues together.
Collecting similar issues together can help to highlight general areas of improvement.
8. It’s not just about the bad things.
If you’re sharing your findings with a colleague or boss who may have been responsible for some of the initial decision making, be sure to include a section on what you think has been done well. This helps create a balance between the negative and positive and can soften the overall delivery of the findings.
9. Get others to contribute.
Asking co-workers to also review the website for any issues can provide a different perspective. There is no reason why you can’t also ask friends or family for their opinion for more of an outside view.
10. Summarise and prioritise
When you’re done reviewing, create a summary using a simple table, and list all the issues you have found. Think of the priorities and rank each one as high, medium or low. You can also include an indication of how easy or time-consuming they could be to address.
Want to find out more?
Our UX agency in Zurich can help develop the right strategy from the general navigation to the website strategy. For more information about UX audit and our UX & UI design services, send an email to hello@what.digital.