Alcohol Change UK UX Audit

Having recently onboarded the Alcohol Change UK website, Studio Republic conducted a full User Experience Audit of the site to understand more about its key audiences’ needs and pain points – to determine why it doesn’t show off the organisation to its best, identify opportunities to evolve the content and understand how we can further develop the website to improve the user experience and increase engagement metrics and conversions.

The goal was to discover what wasn’t working across the site and use the recommendations made to pave the way for ongoing digital growth. We then created a road map for updates that will elevate the overall user experience of the Alcohol Change UK website through an ongoing process of collaboration.

At the start of the project, we led a discovery session in which the Alcohol Change team shared their insights into the website’s current level of effectiveness, its weaknesses, and their vision for a more efficient site that can help the organisation achieve its objectives. The Alcohol Change UK team wanted the UX Audit to achieve the following:

– Gaining a better understanding of their audiences, how they use the site and what content they consume

– Reviewing the existing user journeys and navigation in order to understand whether they work and, if they don’t, finding out why, and how they can be improved

– Understanding what content users search for but cannot find on the site

– Gaining a better understanding of their metrics and how they can be improved: not only understanding how people come to the site and how long they stay, but also how to engage them better so as to keep them on the site for longer and encourage them to return.

In order to gather the data that Alcohol Change UK wanted and that we needed in order to perform a thorough UX review, we set out to run several studies in order to gain both quantitative and qualitative insights into users’ behaviour. We conducted:

– A Google Analytics data review. We observed the site’s Google Analytics data for 90 days, in order to understand how people behave on the site and identify opportunities to improve the experience, increase engagement metrics and increase conversions.

– A user survey comprising: questions about users’ demographics; questions specifically put forward by the Alcohol Change UK team; and questions that the UX team at Studio Republic asked in order to unlock fundamental insights into users’ behaviour on the website.

– Usability tests. Designed in collaboration with Alcohol Change UK, these tests ask participants on both mobile and desktop to carry out specific tasks on the website which highlight users’ behaviour in relation to both specific pages and the site overall.

– A heuristic evaluation. A method for finding potential issues in a design by judging it relative to proven principles created by the UX research organisation Nielsen Norman Group. We reviewed the Alcohol Change UK website against ten heuristics, giving each a score of 0-10.

– Accessibility report. We used the automated accessibility tool ‘Accessible Web Helper’ to scan the website for accessibility issues.

In the weeks after setting up the research methods, we gathered a large amount of data, which we used to draw observations, create a set of 12 personas, and make actionable recommendations.

The feedback we gathered around the Alcohol Change UK website can be grouped into four broad categories:

– Content: While most users find the content on the Alcohol Change UK website useful, valuable and informative, some do not see their demographic and their needs reflected on the site. Some users would also like different types of content, such as daily quotes, podcasts, ‘quit lit’ and so on. Many users want the drinking quizzes and calculators to have more customisable options.

– Navigation and Usability: The biggest challenge for the AC UK’s website users is the navigation. The megamenu is difficult to use, and the labeling of pages is confusing. Call to Actions are hard to spot in the current page hierarchy. The Information Architecture is the aspect of the site that needs the most attention.

– Look and Feel: Many users find the colours difficult to read. Our analysis found that some elements, including a large quantity of white or void space, create an untidy feel, and make scrolling necessary.

– Accessibility: The site doesn’t currently meet accessibility standards, with colour contrast being the main issue. Some users highlighted the need for translation options.

The purpose of our UX Audits is to provide our clients with actionable recommendations. The recommendations are made on the basis of the UX scoping session, of the data gathered through the different types of research methodology applied, and of the personas. In the case of Alcohol Change UK, we made 17 recommendations, which can be grouped into the following areas.

– Improving Findability and Usability by: redesigning the IA and the menu, highlighting user journeys, so promoting content discovery; adding and improving filter and sort options to the search functionality; adding navigational elements like breadcrumbs and anchor links.

– Enhancing content by: including more engaging content types and module functionality to reduce long text; gathering content into a resource library with search, filters and sort modules; utilising the interactive tools to provide personalised onward journeys and so encourage content discovery.

– Improving accessibility by: optimising the site better for mobile; reviewing the look and feel and the digital application of the brand; adding a chat bot for immediate support ad help finding relevant content.

– Tailoring the user experience by: allowing users to create profiles to save resources, track tool scores, monitor progress, personalise content and connect with the community, thus maximising the potential of the site to foster connection between users.