UX Audit

In June 2020, Products by Women (PBW) rebranded and launched a new website, which features events, articles, and podcasts, and provides opportunities for women around the world to connect and network. The purpose of the project was to understand if target users could navigate the site and find what they were looking for easily. In addition, we wanted to gain insight on target users to provide suggestions for design and content decisions.

The project timeline for this UX audit was 1 month. I collaborated with one other UX researcher, Siena Tetali, in order to complete this project. The tools we used for this were google docs, google slides, google forms, zoom, and miro.

Goals + Methodology

Our research goals were: 

• Understand how target users are currently interacting with the PBW website 
• Identify if users can find what they’re looking for
• Find out if target users understand PBW mission and services

Our methodology was: 

• Screener survey
• We conducted 6 usability tests
• Sessions included: User interview questions and 5 specific usability tasks

Usability Testing

In order to understand how Products by Women's target users were engaging with the site, we created a series of 5 tasks for them to perform during the usability test, these tasks included:

• Finding and joining the Products by Women Slack Network
• Finding career support
• Discovering and attending an online event
• Reading an article written by a member of the Products by Women community
• Listening to a podcast produced by Products by Women

Synthesizing the Results

Siena and I used the process of affinity mapping to synthesize the results of our usability testing and interviews. Through this process we were able to create two distinct user personas for Products by Women and to identify 3 minor issues and 1 medium issue for Products by Women to address in order to improve usability and findability of elements on their website.

Based on our UX audit, Products by Women improved their language choice by making their CTAs more clear and understandable. This had a significant impact on the number of women being able to find and join their active slack community. In fact, in the 3 months since the changes were implemented based on our report: 

50% increase in members joining Products by Women's Slack network

This increase speaks to the importance of having clear calls to action that use accessibly and simple language. In the case of Products by Women, their "Join" CTA was not clear because it was too vague. By changing the CTA from "Join" to "Join our SLACK" users more clearly understood what it meant to "Join" and what they were joining before clicking on the button.

To view the full report, click here.