AI Design
Paul Goins
The Asset Intelligence Platform
The Asset Intelligence Platform

What's a User Experience Audit?

A UX audit is an analysis report involving a strategic design inventory exercise and documented list of critical design opportunities to improve a product's user experience. These 8 factors are important to consider. You can use tools such as Capian, Invision, or Google Docs to create and present annotated screenshots to support your reader's comprehension of the audit. Tip: Checkout PageMarker (Chrome Extension) for any easy way to circle, cross out and draw arrows quickly over the browser window before taking your screenshot.

 

1. Quantitative Data

  • What features or content might be a problem today according to analytics?

2. Qualitative Data

  • What heuristic or user-validated insights gan you gather to assess the current state of design?

3. Accessibility

  • Find out what WCAG standards does the client or organization need to abide by?

4. Interactive Pain Points

  • What touchpoints are broken, confusing, difficult, etc.?

5. Information Architecture

  • Analyze your products' content to recommend action steps toward better ways to organize, surface, and tag all the information that's supports user journey and business goals.

6. Branding Violations

  • Assess the organization's brand style guide to call out any ways in which the product breaks brand rules.

7. Performance

  • Run performance testing tools to identify steps to improve site speed and extended use.

8. Recommendations

  • Write actionable steps to resolve (or further investigate) those important product issues and opportunities you identified in the steps above.

4 Qualities of a Good Architect

Visionary architect Gae Aulenti finds these 4 traits most critical to a great architect. IMO, this is just as applicable to the design profession.

1. Analytic talent

Know how to study and recognize every different kind of architecture, to create unique, specific solutions with respect to their context, their foundation place.

2. Synthetic talent

Know how to make the necessary synthesis to give priority to the major architectural principles, to disregard what is arbitrary in a project.

3. Prophetic capacity

Embrace the art, poetry, and aspiration for invention for your project.

4. Awareness

Surface and understand Biases.

7 Best Practices for building a Design System

  • Do the UI inventory first.
  • Discover top 10 components to address, and stick to those.
  • Make type clear and accessible. 
  • Use color, illustration and shape for creative expression.
  • Check typefaces and all UI elements on non retina and retina devices.
  • Checkout Salesforce lightning framework for inspiration.
  • Design systems are principally for for the agency’s internal design and engineering teams’ organization for design consistency. Your client cares more about the page mockups and how those modules look together for important pages in the funnel.