The Simple Way to Conduct a UX Audit
What you'll learn
- How to evaluate the quality, usefulness, usability and value of any app, website or software system by conducting a UX audit.
Requirements
- General familiarity with UX, UI Design and Interaction Design principles
Description
Auditing — which just means evaluating and analyzing — the quality of an app, website or enterprise software system's user experience (UX) is the fastest way to figure out what's working, what isn't, and how to improve it. Where the user experience is failing people; where they're stuck or confused or frustrated. Or, in many cases, where they decide to stop using it altogether.
What I’m going give you in this course are my core rules for conducting a UX Audit: where to look, what to look for and what questions to ask to determine what needs to be improved (and why).
I'm going to walk you through the 5 parts of conducting a simple, effective UX audit or evaluation:
Uncover goals and intended outcomes on both sides of the UX value loop, meaning both for the business and for the product’s users. What do people expect to be able to do — and what do they want to happen — as a result of using this site, app or system? What does the business need to happen in order to ensure the product's usefulness, user/customer loyalty and profitability?
Review existing analytics. Organizations track the performance of their sites and apps using Google Analytics. The data collected can be quite valuable to you, because it can tell you some things about who’s interacting with the product and what they’re doing while they’re there.
Review the product’s core interaction states:
The Blank State. This is what people see the very first time they launch it or when they log in.
The Working State. This is what people see and interact with during the normal course of use, with data, content and controls in place.
The Error State. This is what people see when something goes wrong.
Review the product based on UX heuristics across Language, Priority, Universality and Visual Clarity. When I look at the core interaction states above, I’m evaluating what I see and experience across these five categories.
Deliver findings and recommendations for improvement. I'll show you an example of the video deliverable I give to clients to communicate the issues I've found and what I recommend they do to resolve them.
You'll also see concrete examples of each step, taken from one of my UX audits with a client, along with my downloadable UX Audit Workbook. After you’ve gone through the product and considered everything above, you’ll use the workbook to take a second, deeper dive into the 170-plus individual elements and attributes you need to pay attention to during your audit.
Who this course is for:
- UXers, Designers and Developers tasked with improving the UX of any kind of app, website or software system.
Instructor
For more than 30 years, I've helped organizations build better products and helped the people behind those products become more effective at what they do.
Over 400,000 students around the world have taken my courses across multiple learning platforms, but the number I'm proudest of isn't an enrollment statistic. It's the number of students who've told me they finally understand why things happen the way they do inside product teams, and how to navigate them with confidence.
My career has taken me from startups to Fortune 100 companies, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and federal government agencies. I've worked with companies like Google, Meta, Broadridge, Kroll, Johns Hopkins and many others, as well as organizations including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Those experiences shaped how I teach.
Most courses focus on process: the steps, the deliverables, the frameworks, the tools.
Those things do matter — but they're rarely what determines whether a product succeeds.
The biggest challenges I've seen over three decades aren't usually technical. They're misunderstandings. Misaligned priorities. Poor communication. Unclear goals. Decisions made without evidence. Teams working hard... but not together.
That's why my courses are different.
Yes, you'll learn UX, UI, product design, research, prototyping and strategy. But you'll also learn how to think critically, communicate your ideas, influence decisions, collaborate with stakeholders and solve the kinds of messy, real-world problems that aren't covered in most textbooks.
Everything I teach comes from actual projects, not hypothetical examples. When I explain a concept, it's because I've watched it succeed (or fail) with real teams building real products under real business constraints.
I'm also the author or co-author of multiple books on User Experience and Product Design, including The User Experience Team of One (Second Edition), published by Rosenfeld Media. I've spent more than two decades speaking at conferences around the world, but teaching remains my favorite part of what I do because it gives me the opportunity to help people build careers — and not just products.
Whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this work for years, my goal is the same: to give you practical skills, better judgment and a deeper understanding of how successful products (and successful careers) are really built.
I'm glad you're here. And I am honored to be part of your journey.