A memoir of an IxD about her love for auditing product experience.

Finally! After 2 years of thinking back and forth about posting UX-related content on this platform (or any platform, actually…)

As an Interaction Designer (IxD) with a dash of passion for data and research. One of my favorite thing to do before jumping into ideation, interviews, design, or literally anything on a UX design life cycle is to do a UX Audit.

I will now tell you a story of how UX Audit might help us when we are at the starting line at the discovery phase of a UX design life cycle especially when our mission is to✨ refine a legacy product ✨

1. So, what is a UX Audit?

To put it simply, it’s an evaluation of a digital product.

Goal: detect and find usability issues that might be publicly or secretly existing on that particular product.
(we’re playing detective here, fun eh?🕵🏿‍♀️)

When facing a ✨legacy product✨ this activity will help us designers become the user and understand 2 crucial elements :

1. the Product — assuming we’ve never even heard them before
2. and the PAIN!

2. How to do it, eh?

U CAN DO IT AS U LIKE.
Really.

There is no official or patented framework that you need to take a class and get a certification in order to do this audit (maybe there are — but by the time I write this, you don’t really need to).
As long as you have a basic knowledge of UX Design, and of course you need to understand the concept of product usability.

But because this is my memoir, I tell you my favorite way of doing this —

Google it yourself lah.

LOL, jk 😅 don't be mad.
Of course, you can find other methodologies by googling.

But my way of doing the audit is by assessing it based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.
These are the steps if you mind reading:

Step 1 — For each of the usability categories, create a checklist of crucial features/information/items that would represent the heuristic category.
(tool: excel / google sheet / notion / notepad / figjam / miro / anything lah)

Step 2 — Cross check the checklist with your UX friends, this is important to avoid bias. Then, hire them to do this with you too! *free of charge, if possible
(I usually ask 1–2 people)

Step 3 — On your preferred audit tool, create a scoring space/sheet individually for each of the auditors. This is your space to assess and write your findings.

Step 4 — Go check that app! Based on the checklist, mark the items that passed and not passed the scoring checklist.
(my tip: write your reason, put a screenshot, and mark the problematic area. Your brain couldn’t remember them all)

Step 5 — Assess & discuss your findings with the other auditors, and conclude which category from the 10 usability heuristics is lacking.

3. Then, what is the output?

It’ll be a report, lol.
in the report there are some pointers that we need to highlight based on our findings:

1. The heuristic category they’re doing good at.
2. The bad one.
3. List of problems we found on the baddies. (include screenshots!!)
4. Suggest & Recommend — optional*

This report is very flexible, we can write it and synthesize it in any style that we like. We can keep it qualitative or we can even quantify it using scores and charts and even benchmark it with competitors! 👹🤡👻

And it doesn't even have to contain the suggestion part if we think it’s too early to conclude and we don’t even have it yet at the moment.

4. What’s next?

(if we got a handful of time…and budget) we can further enhance our findings from the audit by interviewing the real-real-users to justify our findings and gather more insights.

Then the rest will come as follows to complete the discovery stage:
1. ideate a list of solutions based on the findings
2. weigh and prioritize solutions
3. create a design/development roadmap — another activity that I also LOVE, will talk about it another time

But m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e sometimes when the timeline is tight (and the budget is nonexistent), findings from the audit are totally fine and they’re actually enough to be our baseline for the ideation part. And, this flexibility is what makes me really love this whole audit thingy.

err.. i think that’s all

thank YOU for bearing with me and reading this post

would love to give y’all some case studies and examples, but it will take me some time to find and audit the app.
Soon! Will show you this study case in another post.

Cya🤘🏿