Insight and opinion

What does a UX Review involve?

A UX Review is a review of an existing product (normally a website or app), conducted by a UX expert, who will identify key usability issues and an improvement strategy to more accurately meet your user needs and business goals. These improvements can impact website conversions, brand loyalty, retention and referrals, to name a few.

As previously outlined in What is a UX Review and why do it? we look at three key discovery areas to learn what a great online experience looks like for your brand.

Insight + Data + Expertise = Recommendations

Here’s a breakdown of what each area consists of:

InsightBrand Questionnaire
Business Metrics
DataWeb Analytics
Reporting
ExpertiseExpert Review
Heuristic Evaluation
Benchmarking
RecommendationsActionable recommendations
Quick wins vs Major projects

There is no simple formula to follow with this type of review. Our UX designers have decades of digital design experience that they can pull from to instinctively provide direction for improvements. Of course, there are far more UX activities that exist in our toolkit, but the above are the recommended as a starter to provide you with accurate advice and recommendations. Other activities include user research, focus groups, persona development, stakeholder interviews, rapid prototyping, content audits, user testing, A/B testing and many more.

Insight

This is where you come in

Before we start, we’ll need to understand more about your brand, as it stands today. What is working and what’s not. Knowing what your business goals are and what success looks like to you will help us to focus our recommendations. We will ask you to complete a short questionnaire that gives us valuable insight into your brand. This helps us to become familiar with your ambition, your audiences, your competitors, your success factors.

We need to understand what it is you’re trying to achieve. For example, is it sales that you care most about or leads, registrations, active users? We need to know what to measure so we can suggest improvements to the user experience that will directly impact that metric.

Data

Data gives us clues of where to look for usability issues

Access to website statistics will enable us to see where and why your customers aren't converting. We’ll look at your search terms, bounce rates and user flows to understand your visitor’s behaviour to identify their needs.

If you’re already sending emails to your customer then we can review the success of these and determine what content gets the most clicks, what subject lines are more effective and how creative plays a part. Similarly, the same goes for social campaigns you might be running.

Expertise

Free online tools don’t provide you with over a decade of industry experience

The free tools out there just do a quick sweep of your website and spit out a generic report. They use algorithms and calculations which don’t equate into tangible actions. There is no substitute for 'real experts' drawing on 'real experiences' from 'real projects'. We'll review your existing website against recognised UX principles to find usability problems and learn where to focus your effort. The outcome of this could include improvements to task orientation, navigation, content, layouts, design, trust, credibility and other such criteria.

A step by step cognitive walkthrough of your website’s most common user journeys will allow us to record observations and define areas for improvement.

We’ll look at rival brands and comparative services that your customers are likely to encounter. By considering this, we can learn what the optimal experience looks like to inform any necessary changes.

Recommendations

What you'll get

We'll share a full UX Review report of our findings and recommendations, put together personally by one of our experienced UX practitioners. The objective of the report is to highlight the wider context behind each identified UX issue, outline the severity and provide actionable recommendations.

These suggestions will be split into Quick Wins vs Major Projects.

Quick Wins
Fixes that can quickly impact your success factors but require little effort. This could be a more informative button text or a change in link colour that increases accessibility.

Major Projects
The bigger usability issues are less easy to fix and should be talked about with an understanding that they will require time and budget. This could be a recommended content audit resulting in a more intuitive site navigation that makes it easier for users to achieve their desired goals.

A good UX Review will highlight ways to enhance your users online experience, resulting in a positive perception of your brand and increased conversions.

If you think your website could benefit from a UX Review to optimise your user journeys and increase conversions, then get in touch. Please contact our team on 0115 941 2184 or email hello@sandbox-studios.co.uk.