How to Structure A Client Friendly UX Review

A UX review can help identify usability and experience problems, and from there, solutions can be put into action. Generally, if a UX review is required, it’s because the client requires an objective point of view. As such, a third party is required to do the job.

Gather analytics and personas

In order to be objective, you will need to collect numbers from analytics, and you will need personas. If you need some tips about creating user personas, check our recent blog post: 5 Steps to Define Your User Persona. This can help break down the problem. Whichever analytics page you are using, you will be looking to identify user goals, which can be understood with the client’s landing page. You can then look at the bounce rate, which indicates how many users are hitting the landing page and then not visiting the other pages. If the bounce rate is over 50%, then you know there’s issues.

Check out behaviour flows

If you are using Google Analytics, you can look at behaviour flows, which identify which order the pages of a website are most commonly visited, and whereabouts users drop out. Goal tracking can also be set up to view a user’s journey. Each user could have a different journey, and will help in identifying user types.

Measure your problems

Split your results into two groups: experience and usability. Usability problems are generally easy to fix. When making notes, rate the severity of the problem on a scale of 1-3, with 3 being the worst outcome. You should also be reviewing the website on the device your user is browsing the website. You could use PowerPoint to document your findings. This will then help you break down and explain the problems to your client, as well as how you will solve them. More severe problems, like an online shop not offering next-day delivery, for example, will take a lot more fixing and should be given their own page in your document and heading. Often, these problems come down to the organisation and it’s processes, and will need more than a UX consultant to fix them.

Structure your report

A good report structure may look like this: – Approach – Overview of easily fixed usability issues – Overview of experience issues – Overview of analytics results – User journeys – Personas – Detailed review In your review you could either organise and categorise the usability issues using a heuristic evaluation, or your review could alternatively lay out your goals and actions.

Workshopping

Following your review, it is useful to hold a workshop in which you can converse with your team and your client about any identified issues, helping everyone understand them, as well as the actions required to resolve them. You can discuss how your review was conducted and begin to assign your team their actions.

Conclusion

With a UX review and plan of attack in place, big issues soon grow smaller until they are obsolete. It can help identify problems both your client and yourself didn’t even realise were there, and you can begin to improve the website to the justice of your client’s business. Find out how we can help improve your user experience here, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch; we’re always happy to chat.