Interview with Corinne Leulier - UX Audits - Capian Expert Series
In this interview, Corinne Leulier explains what an UX audit is and when it’s best to use one. Corinne is the director of user experience and innovation, change, and agility at Klee Group. You can follow her on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Thanks, Corinne!
In this series, we interview UX professionals about the importance of usability, ergonomic, and expert evaluations.
Please excuse the sound quality during the first few seconds of the video.
Interview translation
What is an expert evaluation?
The usability expert review is a methodology that allows you to simply discover the strengths and weaknesses - especially the weaknesses, but you also need to find the strengths - of a product that will either be redone or of a product that will be used as the jumping-off-point for a new product. An ergonomic evaluation is super important in order to have an idea of what’s happening before our intervention and to have, later, good KPIs after our intervention, as well as a good return on investment that allow us to show and give value to our work.
L’évaluation experte, c’est une méthodologie qui permet simplement de découvrir les forces, les faiblesses, surtout les faiblesses, mais on s’attache aussi à trouver les forces d’un produit qui va soit être refait ou dont on va repartir pour créer un nouveau produit. L’évaluation en ergonomie est super importante pour avoir une photo de ce qui se passe avant notre intervention et pour ensuite avoir de bon KPIs après notre intervention et un bon retour sur investissement des informations qui nous permettent de bien montrer et valoriser l’apport de notre travail.
When do you use UX audits?
We do evaluations at several points during the design process. We do them beforehand, that is, before going to a client, we always have a period where we’ll see what’s available online. We do mini audits to have some material that salespeople, project managers, even the UX designers can build upon and then we do an inventory of the client’s brand’s ‘ecosystem’ to try and understand exactly where the problems lies and to have an anchoring point to more easily sell our ergonomic studies. Then, in the projects, we do an audit each time we do a test to try and find the places in the application we’ll have to focus on during the tests to identify what’s creating problems for the users. What’s interesting is that, with the audits we can figure out what’s wrong a lot faster, but we still need the tests for business information since we as experts are experts of ergonomics and UX rather than the business itself. So it’s very useful. And finally we use audits at the end of a project. When you’ve already done one beforehand, the second time around is very lucrative for our clients as well as internally to show the added value of UX. Having before and after snapshots is also a good selling point for the sales people.