Today’s class was a short one.
In class today we had a group task which allowed us to have a go at a UX Audit. In groups of three we identified problems with the Translink website (There was a lot, gotta love Translink) This was my first time completing this process, so I did a bit of research to allow me to fully understand what they are and why they are important.
A UX audit is a process of analysing a website or app, evaluating how easy it is for users to use. They measure user satisfaction across usability, interface design, accessibility, information architecture, and performance. It is a great way to identify problems or areas of improvement in a digital product, and are often conducted by designers on their own products for this reason.
A thorough UX audit ****involves a range of activities, including:
Many professional UX audits involve looking at data, usually quantitative data like bounce rates and clicks, to see where the user experience seems to be lacking. Looking at these data trends means they can back up their findings with qualitative data, by actually talking to users or watching them use the product. Using these data types in a UX audit means you’re getting the full picture and understand the user’s journeys. In class, our audit on the translink site was simple. We went through each screen, walking through a typical user’s journey and made a note of everything that could be improved.
Part of the process is a Heuristics Analysis, which we completed in class as part of our Audit.
Heuristics are baaasically mental shortcuts that help people make quick decisions. They are rules or methods that help people solve problems efficiently using problem solving and past experiences. They are commonly used to simplify problems and avoid cognitive overload, utilising how the brain is wired, allowing individuals to quickly reach reasonable conclusions or solutions to complex problems. They are used in design frequently. When adhering to the identified heuristics, designers and product teams can effectively identify issues, enhance efficiency, increase learnability, reduce errors, and improve user satisfaction for their products or services. This is done first by analysing the product.
Useful for identifying glaring problems in an interface. This means going through and assessing your website or app screen-by-screen. A Heuristic analysis should help you identify any glaring issues previously missed. The method can be especially helpful early in the design process, as it is something you can do without having to test with actual participants. However, they cannot replace user research in the long run. To design good experiences, you’ll still need to test with actual users.
The 10 Usability Heuristics by the Nielsen Norman group are seen as a solid framework for the process. It can be used to assess factors like consistency, user control and design. We used this for our class exercise, taking the problems we identified and assigning them one of the 10 heuristics identified by NN. We graded each on how critical the issue was, using this diagram:
We identified a few different issues during our UX audit including: