Large enterprises often face challenges when it comes to the user experience of their technology. The biggest challenges we’ve witnessed during our engagements with clients have been low adoption and low engagement of the technology solutions they have built.
Understandably, this leads to frustration among leadership who exhausted so much time, energy, and budget creating and supporting solutions for their teams only to experience minimal ROI. If this challenge sounds familiar, you may be ready to conduct a comprehensive UX Audit.
What is a UX Audit?
A UX Audit is an in-depth assessment of an existing digital experience. UX Audits can help businesses understand opportunities for improvement, sources of unnecessary friction, and features that might need to be fixed to meet certain standards. These are all ways that a UX Audit can help modernize a product and identify top priorities for a redesign.
Who are UX Audits for?
UX Audits are good for both B2B and B2C companies. Any organization seeking to reconcile multiple products or align its technology more closely with customer or employee needs will benefit from a UX Audit. The key is being willing and able to take on the recommendations that result from the audit.
Crema’s UX Audit Process
There are a variety of methodologies out there for performing UX Audits. At Crema, we have an established process that we follow which resulted from our experience leading many UX audits with our clients and seeing them improve their experiences by following the recommendations we’ve made.
First, our team meets with clients to gain an understanding of what their product is meant to do and what use cases they want to evaluate. Then we get to work, surveying users, discovering their biggest pain points, and walking through the product as if we are the user.
We evaluate the product according to a checklist of UX principles and a set of well-established heuristics that we’ve created through years of experience improving clients’ tools. Usability, utility, desirability and accessibility are some of the most important principles that we grade a tool against.
Usability & Utility
Usability and utility are the chief principles that we look at when grading the UX in a tool, and it’s what usually comes to mind when thinking about UX.
Within the usability principle, we ask questions like: Can the user accomplish tasks without friction? Does the experience help prevent the user from errors? Does it help them recover from errors such as typos or incorrect passwords? Do all of the buttons go where they’re supposed to go? Can users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily?
Users will inevitably make mistakes, but user experience with usability in mind will help prevent and correct them.
While usability handles the way a tool feels and behaves, utility is about what the technology offers. We conduct a competitive audit of the market to determine how the product stacks up against other available options and identify areas where utility can be improved.
Desirability
Desirability is underestimated, but 95% of a brand’s perception comes from the way the experience looks and feels to the end user. It’s important that users want to use it and choose it over the available alternatives. Desirability involves evaluating the aesthetics, modernity, and ease of use.
Accessibility
Accessibility is important because we want everyone to be able to use a product or tool regardless of any disabilities or environments. Tools should be optimized for use indoors, and outdoors, on various devices such as tablets, smartphones, or laptops, and on different platforms.
With the results from the checklist, we create a list of pain points and areas for improvement. Finally, we turn the list of pain points into recommendations for design changes such as functional improvements, content updates, and anything that needs to be done to improve the overall experience of the technology.
In conclusion
Companies that don’t invest in their user experience can be surpassed by the competition that have better tooling and processes that support it. According to a Forrester Research report, every dollar invested in UX creates $100 in return. And the Design Management Institute reported that companies that prioritize design, including UX, outperform the S&P 500 by 228% over ten years. This statistic underscores the competitive advantage gained through investment in UX.
We recommend a UX audit to any organization that feels the effect of low utilization, inaccurate data, and drawn-out tasks.
Investments in UX are poised for sustained growth across all sectors of technology. Given the potential for a substantial return on investment, it’s impossible to ignore how prioritizing UX is a great first step towards making a more significant impact on users with your product.
