This article is part of the Founder’s Guide to UX Research, where we break down methods that will help you and your product team understand your users, improve your product eXperience, and exceed your business goals. See our previous article on Usability Testing for more.
How often do you take a holistic look at your product eXperience? While a usability test can give you an in-depth look from your user’s point of view, how can you look at your product from a more objective and specialized point of view instead?
“Show it to a specialist, duh!”
Today’s topic: the eXperience audit.
An eXperience audit, aka “Expert Design Review,” is a quick way to make sure your product does not contain any basic usability errors and to identify potential areas of improvement. In an eXperience audit, your product is evaluated against a set of industry best practices by a design expert and scored based on its impact on your users’ eXperience.
You can tailor an eXperience audit to your business goals — focus specifically on adoption, retention, or satisfaction.
Any type of organization will benefit from performing and eXperience audit on their product, especially those without a dedicated UX function. eXperience audits are best for:
The findings from an eXperience audit are useful for anyone from the CEO to a Product Manager who needs a fast and actionable evaluation of their product without having to recruit users. An audit can provide value for any product from the pre-launch phase through mature products.
eXperience audits are most fruitful when bringing in an expert who has extensive experience in usability testing but has not been involved in the design process.
An eXperience audit is carried out by a dedicated UX function, so the time to gather insights is greatly reduced. With that in mind, the scope and resources you allocate to the audit can affect the cost.
Benefits:
Constraints:
The result of an eXperience Audit is a quantified, actionable scorecard which highlights the issues in a design, prioritized by severity and value-chain level. We’ll go over this scoring mechanism in a later article, so stay tuned!