3 steps to a great UX health check.
How to measure the baseline quality of user experience and assesses changes in quality over time.
Where your product is improving, congratulate yourselves. Where your product is underperforming relative to your baseline, focus on your next round of improvements. — Leah Buley.
1. Focus on what matters.
Stop looking at what everyone else is doing for a moment and listen to your user’s feedback before jumping into your next big idea. Sometimes, what is the best solution for someone else it might not be the best for you.
You could start by answering these three simple questions:
What’s the problem that users always complain about? How are they using my product? and Why is that?…
The Pareto Rule.
(Also known as the 80/20 rule) This principle named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes for many events.
The Standish Group published a chart that showed how functions and features broke down in software products. The chart showed that customers never used 45% of the functions and features delivered in software on average. 19% of them were rarely used. 16% were sometimes used. 13% was often used. And finally, 7% was always used.
Look closely to the chart and you’ll see Pareto’s rule. Only 20% of the software was often or always used even though they were paying for 100% of the software.
So, where should we start working on? On the highest-value items first. You always start to work on the “always used” feature, then you move to the often and then sometimes used. This way you finished tasks quickly.
2. Create UX Briefs.
This is a practice I started doing recently about our customers. It has been helpful to me and my team to keep track of how every client is doing, their goals, visions, and expected outcomes from beginning to end of our product. This provides a quick overview of them to look at if we need to go back and contact them again it will be easy to catch up.
A UX Brief could have:
- Project Name
- Description
- Stakeholder/Users
- Goals
- Deliverables
- External Resources, etc.
And because it’s always nice to have everything well documented.
3. Set Competitive Benchmarks
… and measure yourself against them.
For example, you want your product’s shopping experience to be as good as Amazon’s. Or you want your live videos to be as good as Facebook’s, and so on. You might not be able to make it 100% as good but maybe 50% as good would be great.
Give your product a rating based on your collected feedback and give each section a percentage number that reflects where you think you are today.
Moodboards are also a great exercise at this point to keep track of your benchmarks. And don’t forget to add it to your UX Brief!
Do an audit with cross-functional teams on the quality of the product’s user experience. It’s a way to quickly figure out how well the team feels the product is currently measuring up against user experience expectations.
A UX Health Check at any time is a good idea, same as it is for you to go to the doctor every now and then.
Book recommendation for the weekend: The User Experience Team of One. In this great book, you’ll learn how to start researching, test and validate your ideas with multiple methods that will help you understand who you are designing for.
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