How do you prioritize and scope the UX audit goals and deliverables?

A valuable UX Audit is a suit—made to fit perfectly, not an off-the-rack template. The scope or purpose of a UX Audit is actually it's 'alignment'. This comes from defining 3 key parameters: 1. Target User Profile 2. Current Usage Metrics 3. Product/ Business Goals An Audit that considers the business context, understands the user's mental model and considers actual user usage behaviour drives real Product Growth.

In my experience, prioritizing and scoping UX audit goals and deliverables involves aligning with organizational objectives, identifying critical pain points, and considering resource constraints. Begin by defining clear goals and objectives that address specific user experience challenges or opportunities. Prioritize audit areas based on their impact on user satisfaction, business goals, and feasibility of improvement. Scope deliverables to focus on actionable insights and recommendations that address identified issues effectively. Ensure stakeholder buy-in and allocate resources accordingly to support the audit process and implementation of findings.

Prioritizing UX audit goals involves understanding project objectives, user needs, and business priorities. I start by defining clear goals aligned with these factors, ensuring they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Scoping deliverables involves identifying key areas for evaluation, such as usability, accessibility, and brand consistency. I collaborate with stakeholders to establish priorities, balancing depth of analysis with available resources and project timelines. Flexibility is key, allowing adjustments based on emerging insights and changing project requirements.

Before initiating a UX audit, it's crucial to clarify the objectives, desired outcomes, and evaluation criteria. Define the scope by specifying the features, pages, or flows to be assessed and the evaluation methods to be employed. This alignment with stakeholders ensures realistic timelines, budgets, and prevents scope creep.

In my experience, prioritizing and scoping UX audit goals and deliverables involves identifying key user pain points and business objectives, setting clear criteria for success, and focusing on the most impactful areas. Creating a detailed audit plan with specific milestones and deliverables ensures that the audit remains aligned with goals and provides actionable insights for improvement.

In my experience as a UX Manager, it's essential to understand the needs of internal stakeholders, who are our main users. It's crucial to be familiar with their areas, the values they add to the company, their goals, and to understand how UX can assist them. I develop a strategy based on these insights, supplemented by specific UX and user knowledge. The plan, supported by a prominent sponsor, includes vision, goals, problems to be solved, and OKRs to monitor progress. I conduct monthly check-ins to present advances, where it's important to link metrics to actual business impacts, strengthening the understanding of UX. This process requires analytical skills and the ability to articulate effectively.

Perform a stakeholder analysis to identify and understand the needs, expectations, and perspectives of all involved parties, including clients, users, team members, and managers. This ensures that UX audit goals and deliverables are relevant, valuable, and aligned with both business objectives and user needs.

Understanding stakeholder needs through analysis is crucial for ensuring your UX audit aligns with business goals and user expectations. How do you currently identify and address the perspectives and needs of various stakeholders to make your UX audit relevant and valuable?

Define your stakeholder map early on to avoid confusion within the design process and the priority of activities. Once the direction and UX strategy is worked out with stakeholder buy-in, the execution is much easier. UX audit can help everyone tie those design exercises to the goals set with the stakeholders. Whenever we find ourselves drifting from that set of agreed upon landmarks to hit, we can course correct and project the impact on users and business. Design Leadership plays a crucial role here by identifying the correct frequency and depth of UX audits. You don't want to make team members feel untrustworthy but also need to make sure their efforts are being recognized towards the bigger organizational picture.

When your goals and objectives are set right, the execution strategy in your UX is the next to consider which can be measured and benchmarked by conducting a competitive analysis to determine your difference from your competitors in place of product design, functionality, user's experience and overall performance. This helps to identify and modify your unique selling point.

Al hacer un análisis competitivo en UX, debemos tener claros los criterios cuantitativos y cualitativos del estudio. Estos criterios deben ser cuidadosamente seleccionados según la necesidad del proyecto y el output que nos servirá para tomar decisiones de dise?o con valor. Antes de sumergirnos en las heurísticas de Nielsen u otro conjunto estandarizado, pregúntate: ?Este criterio me sirve para el problema que necesito resolver? ?Cuáles son los límites de mi investigación? ?Cómo traduzco cada criterio en un insight valioso para mi dise?o? Así evitamos perder el foco y hacemos un uso efectivo del tiempo :)

Conduct a competitive analysis to compare your product/service with competitors in terms of UX, functionality, features, design, and branding. This benchmarks your performance, identifies unique selling points, and reveals improvement opportunities.

Research is the base of any design concept. Some times you learn directly from your users, or prospective customers, and some times you learn from your competitors. There are always noticeable factors when you analyze the experience of any product or service. You often learn the experiences that you would like to avoid as well. With that library of competitive analysis, a backlog is grown overtime that helps shape the product or service release after release. These can be specific for a particular feature, or a particular user group, or for a particular competitor to understand and surpass the current user needs.

Competitive analysis is essential for uncovering your unique strengths and opportunities in the market. How do you currently use competitive insights to benchmark your product and identify areas for differentiation and improvement?

A great way is to use the NN/G Usability Heuristics to classify the issues you are surfacing. - Compiling a list in excel (or your favorite tool for cataloging) - Tag each issue with the right heuristics - Assess the severity (sizing issues with high, medium, low priority is a great way to do that, and you can also use conditional formatting to make it more "visual", red for high severity, etc). - Lastly, screenshotting and showing the issue is key. I highly recommend that part. - Bonus: If you have time to go deeper, tie the issues with the right company objectives/OKRs so that they can be justifiable.

I would add to @angelos comment, If you are planing to do it on a digital product accessible from your Browser just use the plugin ;) -UX check- on your Browser. Will save you a tone of time.

Outcomes > Outputs - for everything we think we could/should do ensure it ladders up to achieving the outcomes we aim to achieve. This is also a really powerful method to manage stakeholders. In almost every organization, all parties are aware that resources are limited. Prioritizing some things over others doesn't mean the other things aren't important or valuable. It means that we have to choose a place to start and that starting point should generally align with the best path to achieving the outcomes that deliver the most value. Once we start achieving outcomes, we unlock more resources to do more things (which lets us tackle everything else).

After analyzing data from methods like heuristic evaluation, user testing, and analytics, prioritize UX issues. Use a matrix to plot severity and frequency, categorizing issues as high, medium, or low priority. This ensures focus on critical problems, optimizing resource allocation.

The outcomes of an UX audit must be cataloged efficiently so they can be utilized at the right time. We can all point to certain backlogs which were never browsable and ended up being discarded over time. These lists needs to be searchable from multiple perspectives. 1. A Product Owner might be interested in finding something that may give us the highest impact over certain competitor, or attract targeted user segments. 2. An Engineering Lead might like to find the ones that would give the biggest uplift to the product while investing minimal effort. 3. A Sales executive might be interested in a feature that would help them cater to an untapped market.

Define UX recommendations to address identified issues and enhance user experience. Offer clear, specific suggestions based on audit data and usability principles. Explain the rationale and benefits of each recommendation, detailing its impact on user behavior and satisfaction.

Planning on goals and deliverables during UX audit is a process of determining priorities and range of tasks in terms of the level of their effect. It is necessary to provide clear and comprehensible actions for main user concerns. - Through data analysis and also feedback from the users, identify major frustrations of top users. - Rank potential challenges on the basis of potential consequences and practicality of resolution. - Develop detailed action plans that include quantifiable objectives for each concern. - Be sure to give desired goals and time frames and ensure they are realistic and achievable by providing the necessary resources. For instance, if users face difficulties in the navigation, go for simplify the menu bar.

By offering clear, data-driven suggestions grounded in best practices, you create a roadmap for improving the user experience. It's important to not only outline the changes but also explain why each recommendation matters. Connecting the proposed improvements to specific user behaviors and satisfaction levels helps stakeholders understand the direct benefits, making the case for implementation much stronger.

To prioritize and define what can be achieved for an audit report it is necessary to think strategically about UX audit goals and deliverables. Prioritize your initiatives according to where they will have the greatest potential for positive change. - Start by realising the main uses issues via data and users feedback. - Arrange the following issues according to their acuteness and relation to business objectives. - Clearly state concrete and specific steps for addressing each of the issue mentioned. - It is necessary to set the deadlines and use resources to work with these points. For instance, if customers are complaining about the difficulties associated with the checkout process, addressing this should be a priority.

It is not safe to assume everyone in the organization is as interested with research and audit findings as you might be. Even great findings gets stashed in reports that no one ends up picking and taking actions for. One of the most important aspect of running an audit is to put the findings to action. For that we always need stakeholders engagement and support. This is achieved via socialization of UX audit reports with all accountable and informed parties. The report needs to explain certain principles of the audit as well. This is where it is also helpful to do walkthroughs of the methodology selection and execution of the process. Often times our audience gets intrigued as they delve more into the aspects of expert reviews.

I also would encourage auditing the entire User Experience maturity of the team and the organization looking at processes, best practices, and standards. Here are some of the questions I would ask the organization: How are we maintaining and communicating design patterns? How are you keeping track of UX debt? How are you measuring impact?

Approach the audit as an iterative process. Start with quick wins, and then gradually tackle more complex issues. Prioritize goals that enhance user experience. Conduct user research to understand what matters most to your audience and target these areas.