Mastering the UX Audit: Your Ticket to User Satisfaction

How to Master the UX Audit and Boost User Satisfaction

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UX Audit - What is it, and Why Should You Care About it

Picture this: you've built an impressive digital product, all flashy bells and whistles included, and you're sure it's bound to be a crowd-pleaser. But the applause you anticipated from your users remains eerily silent. What went wrong? Enter the UX audit. It's the savior you never knew you needed, offering an insightful peek into the labyrinth of user experience.‍

What is a UX audit?

• A thorough examination of your product's usability, accessibility, and overall user happiness.
• It uncovers the hidden pain points that keep your users from singing your praises.

Why should you care?

• User love is the lifeline of your digital empire, and a UX audit is your secret weapon to make your creations intuitive, engaging, and utterly irresistible.

So go on, embrace the wonder of a UX audit, and watch the standing ovations roll in.

How to Set Up and Work Through a UX Audit

A UX, or User Experience audit is crucial in optimizing your website or app to ensure your users have an absolute blast using your product. Embarking on a UX audit is a rewarding adventure, and with a little passion, creativity, and organized thinking, you'll become a UX audit master in no time.

Identify your goals:

Before starting the actual audit, be sure to clearly understand the goals you seek to achieve through the audit. This will help guide your process and ensure you’re focused on the right areas when digging deeper. A few goals to consider:

• Is the intent to solve a problem for a user?
• Is the intent to solve a problem for the business?
• Is the intent to generate more revenue for the business?
• What does the company stand to gain from a success?
• What would a failure look like?
• How much will this cost, and how much do we need to gain to make it worth it?
• When does this need to be done by?

‍Gather existing information

• Review (or create) customer personas with the team.
• Review (or document) the complete user journey from start to end.
• Gather all current existing metrics, user feedback, and surveys, and all existing resources; all of these can be incredibly helpful in understanding the current state of the UX of your product.

Evaluate your product based on UI/UX best practices. These include:

• Consistency - are you using consistent design elements and navigation through your app? Do All the patterns, workflows and steppers follow a familiar process regardless of what section of the app you’re in?
• Clear and concise language - Use language that is easily understood by the user. Avoid Jargon. Remember, clear is kind 🙂
• Fast load times: User expect your app to load quickly. Even if it looks beautiful, the UX will dramatically suffer if they’re waiting for things to load every few minutes.
• Visual Hierarchy: Are you using visual cues like color, typography, and placement to guide the users to important content and actions?

Some additional resources for more reading:

• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
• 7 Usability Heuristics that all UI designers should know

Evaluate your product based on Accessibility best practices. These include:

• Use of semantic HTML - using appropriate HTML tags provides meaningful information to screen readers and other assistive technology. Things like <nav>, <footer>, <aside>, all give more context than just a regular old <div>.
• Appropriate contrast - Strive for AA contrast for all text. This ensures that most people will be able to read your content, buttons and forms even if they have visual impairment. Here is a great tool to use: WCAG Color Contrast Checker - It’s also a chrome plugin!
• Keyboard accessibility - Some users can’t use a mouse and need to navigate a website using their keyboard. Using semantic HTML and using the proper tab index will help users access your content without needing a mouse!
• ARIA labels and Roles - ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and adding these labels and roles to your HTML elements helps screen readers describe UI components more thoroughly. Am I on a zip code form field or just reading about someone’s zip code?
• Readability - Not everyone can read the text at small sizes, even if it meets AA contrast accessibility. Make sure that you allow your text to be resized without using quality. To check this you can “zoom in” with your browser by using (CMD +) or (control +).

Let’s dive deeper into how you can analyze the results of your UX audit now that you have collected everything you need!

Analyzing the Results of a UX Audit

Now that you have collected the data, you can dive into the exciting stage of analyzing your results! Analyzing the results of a UX audit can reveal hidden gems that will transform your product into a user's dream come true.

With each finding, you can diagnose pain points and concoct creative solutions that will captivate and inspire your users. This is your chance to be the hero, the one who rescues a digital experience from the clutches of mediocrity and propels it into the realm of greatness. Embrace the adventure that is analyzing UX audit results – your users (and your bottom line) will thank you for it!

Here’s what you need to do:

• Break Down Your Findings: Start by breaking down your findings into more manageable chunks. Is this a UX issue? A UI consistency problem? An accessibility change? Group related items together and prioritize them based on impact.
• Look for Trends: As you review your findings, look for any trends or patterns that can address several issues by simply correcting one thing. This will inform how you implement fixes or improvements.
• Identify Opportunities: Look for opportunities to leverage the data, feedback, or customer support inquiries to expound on your findings and add more color to them.
• Prioritize Your Actions: Once you have a general idea of what needs to be done, prioritize the actions that need to be taken to achieve the desired outcome

Once you’ve analyzed everything, it’s time to take action and implement the needed changes!

Making Changes Based on UX Audit Findings

The moment you start implementing changes based on those incredibly valuable findings, you are well on your way to improving your overall user experience.

Here are some actionable steps you can take in order to ensure your changes are successful:

• Research and Validate Ideas: Before making any changes, research the issue thoroughly and validate your ideas with existing users. This will help ensure that any solutions you come up with are backed by data and evidence.
• Test and Iterate: As you make changes, test them to gauge their effectiveness. This will allow you to iterate and refine the design until it reaches a point of satisfactory results.
• Execute: Once the implementation plan is finalized, execute the changes. Ensure all stakeholders are on board and that any necessary tasks are completed in a timely manner.
• Track and Analyze Results: After the changes have been made, track and analyze the results to determine if they were successful. This will help you understand what worked, what didn’t work, and how you can continue to improve your user experience.

Make sure to follow this process before you launch a product, at specified increments after the product launch, or anytime you are concerned with the usage of your product. You can continuously uncover new improvement areas to keep bringing delight to your customers, like we did for our Navigate360!

One of the things I hear consistently from customers is how easy to use Visitor Management is.

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Emily Davis

Director of Product
Management - Navigate360

‍Wrapping Up - Get Ready for User Satisfaction!

The UX audit process can be daunting but worth the investment in time and resources. With a comprehensive analysis of user experience data and thoughtful implementation plans, you can transform any digital product into something extraordinary that your users will love! So don’t wait for perfection before making improvements - dive into the world of UX audits and become the champion of user experience that your business needs. Happy auditing!

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