UX Review - Easy Way to Get Directions for Your Product’s Development

How to evaluate which of them are good and which can bear a detrimental impact on the product's performance? One of the methods of doing this is a UX review, during which the product undergoes a comprehensive analysis of user experience and business goals. Take a look at how the UX review helped one of our clients, whym, decide on which direction they should take.

Whym is a live translation app for travellers and travel businesses such as hotels and airports. Whym connects users with professional interpreters in 13 languages from InterpretersPortal.

Netguru was responsible for rewriting the live app (which is available in App Store and Google Play), facilitating the payment process, and making the app appealing to a wide spectrum of user groups. Before the development itself started, whym had been submitted to a comprehensive UX review.

A UX review is a comprehensive 4-phase study, which will assess the current state of a product and identify all factors that may be hampering the client's business success. At the end of a UX review, the client receives a report with a list of issues to fix, quick wins, and recommendations for the future development of the product. You can find out more about the benefits of UX review here.

Recommendations after a UX review

The recommendations a client gets during a UX review can be broken down into three types:

1. high-level recommendations;
2. must-haves;
3. nice-to-haves.

During whym’s UX review, we gave the company multi-level recommendations to implement within the existing iOS application. Besides that, we advised the company on must-haves, which we strongly advise to include in the product, and nice-to-haves, which would improve the reception and clients’ awareness of the application.

The client also got a list of all issues that were reducing the product’s performance:

1. critical issues: severe issues that break the general usability of the platform; they must be addressed in the first place;
2. major issues: high-priority issues that must be addressed; system or business goals can be crippled by those issues;
3. minor issues: low-priority issues in need of fixing; they don’t disrupt the user experience as a whole.

What was the result of the UX review?

We encouraged the client to focus on their users’ behaviour and try to improve the way their first experience with the app. An onboarding platform has been added to whym, thanks to which users don't get discouraged when they begin using the app and continue using it without problems. An additional payment option has also been added to facilitate the payment system and open whym's services to wider customer base. The client was very happy with the review results. Have a look at what whym’s PM said:

We didn't really have any UX/UI-based knowledge when we delivered our MVP, so the UX Review was really helpful in giving us ideas on what direction we should be taking, and what mistakes we had made while going through the design process the first time. It was genuinely a really useful overview of the whole product, and we received a great document, which we still refer to occasionally. Martin Key, Project Manager, whym

How it’s done and what you get?

A UX review is a quick, yet very complex, process which usually takes about a week. Before analysing the product itself, we conduct a detailed market research and competitive benchmarking. This phase enables us to identify the product’s competitive advantage and value proposition that we will later try to enhance.

After an in-depth analysis with the use of market research and analytics tools, we find the best techniques to represent the product’s target user base. Those can include user personas, empathy maps, jobs-to-be-done frameworks. It helps us determine and adjust User Journeys and Experience Matrix in relation to the product's current state. For whym, we created personas and built an empathy map. Thanks to those, we were able to determine what the needs of potential and current users are. At the end of the day, we learned that whym should open its services to a bit of a different audience.

Next, there is an interview with the product team (stakeholders) after which we can create test scenarios. In the case of whym, we created five different scenarios and then carefully analysed them using heuristics and cognitive walkthrough techniques, highlighting the positive aspects as well as potential issues that could hurt the product’s performance.

Together with a 100-page report, the client received suggestions on the next steps of the product’s development. They also got a list of solutions and quick wins that could be applied right away to quickly improve the product’s performance.

Martin Key, Project Manager at whym, called our UX review a “genuinely useful overview of the whole product”. Want to learn more about the UX review or would like us to perform it on your product? Just give us a shout!