Keeping your website in good shape is not an easy task, even if you are an expert in that field. You may know the reasons and solutions for the problems that your website is facing, but it can be a tricky job if you are torn between dozens of everyday duties like meetings, company management, and legal issues.

Besides, website maintenance and improvement can be very expensive, and maybe your current position doesn’t allow you that kind of investment. Or maybe you would prefer to invest those assets into something that will be more beneficial to your organisation. Expert evaluations prove to be very useful in these kinds of situations. They are easy, quick, cheap, and, above everything else, they can help you fix your website problems.

Heuristic Evaluation

This is a usability engineering method that tests website usability. Its primary goal is to discover problems in user interface design and make them solvable. This process involves usability experts who inspect and assess the interface’s compliance with predetermined usability principles.

See also: Fix the Unnecessary Complexity of Your Product and Simplify User Experience

It is recommended for the site to be tested by an experienced UX expert so that you have a professional perspective at the end of the evaluation. This method will deliver you a clear picture of your product’s shortcomings.

If money is an issue, heuristic evaluation can be done by some of your employees using an informal method of reviewing, called heuristic markup. In this method, someone will spend a couple of hours going through the product and doing a set of tasks, just like users would do. This will give you a full close-up of all the weaknesses of your product.

The major advantages of heuristic evaluation are that it doesn’t require extensive involvement, and that it can be used in all phases of the product development, giving you useful guidelines to improve your website and provide a much more friendly experience to its users.

Cognitive Walkthrough

This task-specific approach is made to check product usability. It was designed to test whether new users can handle the interface and easily complete wanted tasks. This is a very cost-effective and fast approach compared to the other usability tests, and it checks product functionality in practice. You can become aware the usability of the product before investing large amounts of money into something that doesn’t work.

The whole process starts by defining the tasks that the user would normally do, and then goes on to the examination of their usability. In other words, tasks are divided into smaller steps. The login process on a website might look like this:

• Open browser
• Navigate to site
• Click login button
• Enter the username in the username field
• Enter the password in the password field
• Click the login button

A cognitive walkthrough should let you know whether the product is intuitive enough for regular users, will they achieve what they want, are the needed actions available, etc.

The good thing about this process is that can be carried out by anyone, and that it can help you prioritize the problems that need solving. It gives you the user’s perspective and, most importantly, fast feedback.

Conversion-oriented Evaluation

By definition, a conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action – for instance, the percentage of users who purchased something on a website. But conversions can also refer to other actions, such as registrations on a website, or signing up for a subscription. There are also microconversions, which are actions like clicking on a certain link or watching a video. From the perspective of UX analytics, microconversions can provide valuable information concerning web page design. An increase of microconversion rates is a clear indicator of a design improvement.

In order for you to make a conversion evaluation that will have a real impact on your product, you should first know what your product goal is. With that in your mind, it will be much easier to use the conversion measurement results in a proper way, and focus on the things that will be beneficial. For example, a website may be focused on selling products and solutions, but also on building up a partnership network – this is where understanding what the split between these two is becomes crucial for the person doing the evaluation.

See also: Knowledge is Power. Harnessing Desk Research to Boost Your Business

Content Audit

Performing a content audit is where content strategy begins. Its primary goal is to conclude if the content is up to date and whether it’s usable. Is it accurate, is it SEO-friendly, can the tools and software deal with it? All in all, an audit shapes content management and helps estimate the feasibility of future projects and determine what the necessities are.

The whole process of auditing begins with the creation of a content inventory, which is a record of the entire website content saved into a spreadsheet and organized into an outline. After this comes a review of the material and grading it, which provides a much better insight and answers many questions. Is it accurate? Does it support both users’ and business goals? Is it useful, is it professional? And most importantly, what are its weaknesses and inconsistencies and what are its strengths?

Once you know your weak spots and strong points, it is much easier to determine future strategies and establish distinctive plans for future product improvements and developments.

UX Review

A UX review is an affordable and fast way to solve your UX issues. This is a professional analysis of user experience and usability based on scientifically-backed methods. The results are compared with the best practices in order to provide the most accurate information concerning market goals, strategy, app usability, its visual impact, intuitiveness, etc.

With a UX Review you will improve your product’s competitiveness and value, and create something that will expand its marketing reach and fully meet your business goals. The data-driven report will provide you with a full assessment of your app’s potential, needs, and a roadmap for creating a product that will meet all your goals.

The Final Words

It is always hard to strike a balance between the least possible involvement, low costs and efficient work. The UX approaches we mentioned satisfy exactly that, and provide a proper way to analyse your website and get a true perspective of its current shape. These methods are not perfect, but the results that they provide, separately or when combined, are more than a good cornerstone for design improvements and full development of your product. When you take into account their costs and results, it is absolutely clear that you’ll get more than you bargained for.