Show your website some UX LOVE

It’s that time of year when love is in the air and this also means thinking about your digital projects and giving them some love.

One way to do this is to do a UX review of your websites and applications to determine if they’re still up to scratch, relevant to the audience and lovely both inside and out.

A UX review is like a doctor’s check-up. Every once in a while you should look at your digital project critically to evaluate whether it is still healthy and meets the needs of your audience. Things that you should look at when doing a UX review…

• Is the content still relevant?
• Is the look and feel still following modern trends?
• Is the functionality what your audience needs?
• Is it converting browsers into customers?
• Are there any requirements imposed by third parties that you could affect the performance of your website? (ie. Google changing its search algorithms to favour mobile friendly websites)
• Are there any roadblocks on the site that could be hindering conversions?
• Are there any security issues?
• Does everything work as it should?

A review can be conducted yourself/internally or by an external UX professional.  A review consists of critically analysing different aspects of the website based on a number of metrics and providing a professional opinion about what the data shows.

The basic  review

A UX review can have a number of components depending on time and budget. It can be anything from reviewing the look and feel or analytics analysis to more involved code reviews and critical appraisals of the technical build of a website.

We will talk here about a broad UX review here as more in-depth or technical reviews are quite specialised and require specific discussions.

A basic UX review can include:

1. General analysis

This is a general and quick analysis of some of the most basic aspects of the digital project such as:

The age of the project
Evaluate how old the project is and how much has been added over time. Sometimes adding components over a long time period results something that is no longer as clear as it could be in terms of functionality or navigation.

Functionality for different device sizes
Check if the site content adapts to different device sizes, or is ‘responsive’. This means that content will be readable by everybody, no matter what device they are viewing it on.

2. Analytics analysis

A critical and data driven analysis of the analytics of the site, including:

• Systems (desktop and mobile)
• Browsers
• Traffic
• Most popular pages
• Most popular paths
• User behaviour
• Conversions

3. Look and feel

A critical review of the look and feel of the site, how it works for the user and does it match expectations in the industry (remember this is not about your opinion).

• Is it meeting current web design standards or does it look dated?
• Is the content area wide enough?
• Is it responsive to different device sizes?
• Does the navigation still work logically (sometimes items are added to the navigation that then results in a poorly messy navigation hierarchy over time)
• Can the user find most content easily (not necessarily with the least number of clicks)
• Are promos being clicked on? Are they impactful?
• Is the content engaging and easy to read?
• Is the user encouraged to explore other content on the site through cross linking (no ed of journeys)

4. Functionality

A review of all the functionality on the site,

• Is everything working as it should?
• Does everything have a click through?
• Does the search return relevant results?
• Is the content accessible?
• Is the content and build search engine friendly?
• Is the URL structure search engine friendly?

5. Competition

A look at what your competitors are doing in the digital space.

• What are your competitors doingb etter than you or worse than you?
• Why are they doing it?
• Is there anyvital functionality that they have that is giving them an advantage?

6. Recommendation

Every review should end with recommendations on how any issues could be solved. This could take the form of simply stating that more research should be conducted into the health of the website in some area or it could be in-depth recommendations of how to make improvements to the site to fix any issues.

Unless and issue is detrimental to the site to the point that is renders the site unusable, not all recommendations need to be completed at the same time and can be staged throughout the year as budget allows.

Going deeper into UX

Complementing a basic UX check-up, you can also conduct the following actions on your site to get a complete picture of whether it is working for your audience.

 User test your website 

Testing your website with existing users to make sure that their expectation and actions match up. User testing is an excellent way of getting quick feedback about what works and what doesn’t on your site.

This could be done via an online user testing platform where tasks are set for the user to complete and data and feedback is collected about how easy or difficult the task was for the user.

Get feedback

Put up a survey on your site which asks for users’ opinion about different aspects of the site. This could be a short survey which takes a couple of minutes to complete or a more in-depth questionnaire which takes longer to complete but offers the user an incentive for finishing (eg gift card or discount).

 The time to start is now

Don’t let a UX review be daunting – it is something that should be done regularly and could be done quite quickly. At best it will show you have a fabulous site but at worst it could show that vital things aren’t working and you could be missing out revenue.

So get going – give your website some love.