How to conduct a Design Audit?

Step 1: Understand the business

The Design Audit process starts with a meeting between the UI UX design team and key stakeholders to align on the primary goals of the Audit. These objectives may include Increasing conversions, Improving Website or App user experience, or Strengthening brand identity.

Beyond identifying the key objectives, the Audit team must also discuss and comprehend other important factors, such as Brand characteristics, Tone of voice, and Desired user journey that the business wants to convey through the digital platforms.

This information helps the UX team plan the necessary tasks, identify the required resources (time and budget), and determine the metrics to measure the results, ensuring the timely completion and effectiveness of the Audit process.

Furthermore, the UI UX team should review the Product Requirement Document (PRD) - A document that consolidates the information shared between the Development, Testing, and Design teams during product development. Revisiting the previous PRDs will help the team better understand the underlying rationale behind the design decisions, enabling them to provide more suitable improvement recommendations.

Step 2: Conduct a product design audit

In this step, the design team will begin applying the standards to identify potential issues in the current Website/App design. Some of the common UI UX design audit standards include:

1. Usability Heuristics

Usability Heuristics is a set of 10 principles for evaluating the usability of a user interface and identifying UX design flaws. This UX framework was developed by renowned website usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich in 1990.

However, a study on Usability Heuristics found that 43% of the UX problems identified through the Usability Heuristics standard are not actually errors. To address this limitation, designers often combine the application of the 10 Usability Heuristics principles with Usability Testing, a method that involves observing users interacting with the digital product and noting their behavior, interaction time, and direct feedback.

By combining the Usability Heuristics evaluation with Usability Testing, the Audit team can validate which identified issues are genuine problems, allowing them to optimize their resources and focus on the most critical areas.

2. Design Principle

Design principles are a set of guidelines that help designers create aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly digital experiences. These principles consider various elements of user interface (UI) design, such as color, shape, balance, contrast, and more. These guidelines are often the result of accumulated observation and practical experience in the field of design.

It's important to note that there is no single, universal set of design principles that can be applied to all design problems. The effectiveness of these principles can vary depending on the specific context and the design challenge at hand. This requires designers to be flexible and adaptable in their approach, allowing them to select and apply the appropriate design solutions for each unique scenario.

Step 3: Report findings and make recommendations

After completing the detailed evaluation, expert team will consolidate the results into a thorough design audit report (or assessment report), which not only outlines the identified issues but also proposes solutions, roadmaps, and design strategies to improve the overall product quality.

In the report, the issues will be identified, with violations of Usability Heuristics marked as H1, H2, H3, and violations of Design Principles marked as D1, D2, D3. Additionally, the identified issues will be classified based on their impact on the user experience, ranging from "Lowest" to "Low - Moderate - High" and the highest impact "Critical." This classification of issue severity helps the designers and stakeholders prioritize the improvement proposals and allocate resources and timelines accordingly.