A Glimpse into our New Deliverable: The UX Audit
We’re working on something new and we’re excited to share it with you!
This posting expresses the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yext and its affiliates, employees, officers, directors or representatives.
Here at Yext, our design team is constantly working to deliver work to our clients that is up to date with our best practices and industry standards. Recently, we took a step back to reflect on how we could introduce a more iterative approach to our process. After numerous discussions and brainstorming sessions, a new addition to our design process was born — the UX audit.
At a high level, the goal of the audit is to revisit and identify areas of opportunity in our past designs while keeping the most up to date UX practices in mind. But, we didn’t just want to hand over a laundry list of recommendations to our clients, we wanted to ground our findings in research and data to ensure that our clients could find confidence in our recommendations. To achieve this, we broke the audit down into three valuable steps.
UX Heuristics Evaluation
We decided to kick start the audit with a detailed inspection of the designs at hand, highlighting areas on the client’s webpage that could be redesigned for a better customer experience. In this step of the audit, we look to our guiding principles to inform our judgements and make recommendations with our clients’ business goals in mind. The areas of opportunity identified in this step ignite questions that provide direction throughout the rest of the audit.
The foundation of our team’s best practices rests in the user experience principles that we’ve collected and amended over the years. It’s become second nature to leverage this knowledge in our day to day work. For the audit, we assembled a list of UX laws that we found relevant to our work. Each recommendation or call out we make references one or more of these laws. Ultimately, by backing up our decisions with tried and true UX principles, our recommendations are stronger and more compelling.
Analytics Review
More and more designers have begun relying on hard facts and data to inform their design decisions. After our designs go live on the web, we begin to gather information on user behavior across the site. Through our analytics platform, we learn where users are coming from, what they’re interacting with on the site, and whether or not the conversion goals of the client are being met.
In a recent audit we conducted, we noticed that more than 50% of site visitors were being referred from Google. A good user experience is becoming an increasingly important factor for higher search engine ranking. Keeping this information in mind, we prioritized highlighting accessibility issues that would contribute to increased bounce rates and negatively impact the site’s visibility in searches. The analytics behind the scenes of a site are extremely valuable in identifying a web page’s problem areas so, naturally, they became an important step in the audit.
User Testing
While analytics data gives us a birds eye view of how users are interacting with the webpage, user testing gives us a glimpse into the more micro and intimate user interactions. For the audit, designers select three problem areas they’d like to do a deeper dive into and write tasks relevant to those areas as well as the client’s business goals. We designed a testing template in Usertesting.com where participants are asked to complete these tasks and rate the following on a scale of strongly disagree to strongly agree:
- I was able to successfully complete the task.
- It was clear and easy to complete the task.
These tasks and questions encourage the participants to share their feedback and thoughts surrounding the problem areas being tackled. Since participants are asked to “think out loud,” we get a glimpse into how they perceive certain components and interactions on the page as they go through the tasks. We take note of any strong frustrations shared by participants and identify any positive and negative trends across tests.
We conclude the audit by highlighting several major areas of opportunities for improvement. This acts as a summary of our work and provides the client and our design team with clear direction for future redesigns. Developing this UX audit has taken a lot of research, experimentation, and iterations to get it to where it is now. But thanks to teamwork and collaboration, the process has been extremely rewarding in providing insight that’s made our UX audit impactful for clients.
We hope this article inspires you to think about new and exciting ways to improve your team’s design process!
