How-To: Quick UX Audit for Small Projects
In this article, I am going to talk about how to do a quick UX audit in a few hours for a new project.
S1: The Project
Before starting testing out the product, first understand the project.
- What are the project goals & scope?
- What are the design goals & scope?
- Any specific area this audit should focus on?
- Any resources might be helpful? E.g. any high-level documents, discovery session deck, etc.
Using a recent UX audit I did as an example, the project was a university website, whose main project goal was actually content migration, and the design work was to be kept at a bare minimum.
Design goal wise, the clients didn’t mention anything specific, more like go to our site and give us some improvement ideas.
Then the team showed me a few discovery sessions’ decks, which turned out to be very helpful. It listed out the top personas and their tasks, which was guiding my next steps.
S2: UX Mindset
Since I had limited time, I decided to strategize so that I can spot the low hanging fruit — something we can pursue with small effort and yet bring in great value to the overall experience.
I started out reading the discovery deck - understanding who the main user groups are and what they often do when visiting the site. That contributed to my overarching approach, which was to visit the areas where the majority of the users are doing their main tasks.
Then, following the main user’s steps and imagining myself doing their tasks, I was able to find UX improvements.
For this particular project, I was provided with some resources, where the top personas & tasks are listed. While if you don’t even have such info, it doesn’t hurt to ask the client, who their top personas are, and what their top tasks are when using the platform, which can also be analyzed via Google Analytics.
S3: Use the product
Put yourself in the main persona’s shoes to experience the product
Taking my particular project as an example, the top 1 persona was prospective students, and their top 1 task was to visit the About section to learn more about the university.
So I put myself in their shoes and took the following steps:
Landing on the site -> Clicking on About -> Digging around in this section to learn more about this university.
Note that putting yourself in prospective students’ shoes doesn’t mean taking their steps only, but also really thinking like them.
For a moment, imagine that you really want to learn about this university. Then accidentally clicked on some reference links, which takes you out of the About section. That would be a frustrating experience.
With the user mindset, I started spotting UX issues & give recommendations.
S4: Give recommendations
For a small budget project, you’d like to do the following:
Lead with global changes
What are some quick fixes that can be applied globally, and contribute to a better overall website experience? For example, the navigation bar, the menu, the overall wayfinding experience, does it have breadcrumbs, etc.
Then prioritize the global changes using the Value-Effort matrix as shown below. You would love to hit the “Low Effort & High Value” easy wins as soon as possible.
At least 2 recommendations
Especially for projects with a low budget, it’d be ideal to have at least 2 recommendations, with one being quick fixes, and the other being bigger improvements.
Creating one new block might just require a few more hours, but with a UX audit, many changes’ hours added up would become a lot. A low-cost quick fix recommendation always provides a safety net to fall back to.
For example, when I found that the university's “About” landing page was just long paragraphs of text, which can be daunting for a student. So it’d be a better experience when the key messages are presented as soon as possible, such as numbers and facts. So I offered 2 recommendations:
- Recommendation 1: A quick budget free fix
The simple quick fix is to add some bullet points in the content to highlight some bolded numbers with a button to “Learn more”.
This approach makes the improvement almost budget free, only requiring the content editor to move things around.
- Recommendation 2: Create a new block
Or create a number block like below, which can actually be reusable elsewhere. However, it does require a few hours to build.
S5: Remember to show key progress to the team
When I was 6 hours in doing the audit, I had created over 20 pages of slides with UX improvements. Given the limited scope for both design and development, I did a quick check-in with the internal team.
Before sharing with the team, make sure to clarify, this is just a work in progress UX review, just wanting to gather some quick thoughts - is this enough, anything missing, I was planning to take a look at the following X pages if we want to add more content.
At this time, it gives the manager and dev team a chance to gut check if the changes are going beyond the scope or under.
Actually, when I showed where I was at 6 hours in, the team said that’s a good amount, which saves me more time for the actual design work later on.
The result
The UX audit presentation was very well received, the client loved that there were at least 2 recommendations and the global change approach.
What I’ve learned is that although I took the journeys of one particular persona, it was able to guide me through a quick UX audit process efficiently. While leading with global changes, I was able to look at a small portion of the site but think of reusable components that can be used elsewhere.
In the end, who doesn’t like the high value & low effort zone?
