How UX studio Conducted a Website UX Review for IncQueryLabs.com

UX studio has conducted an expert review for the IT company IncQueryLabs to discover why their website did not perform well.

IncQueryLabs builds software toolchains to boost industrial digitization efforts, by helping their clients to achieve higher quality, faster time to market, reduce development costs, and break vendor lock-in.

IncQueryLabs employs 41 people in total and has its headquarter in Budapest, Hungary. However, it offers its services worldwide.

Goals and Challenges

The main goal of the UX expert review was to discover what causes poor conversion rates as well as what makes visitors leave the website.

IncQueryLabs website didn’t showcase the company’s profile and services in a clear and cohesive way. Upon website check, visitors were not able to describe the company's main activity.

Besides, it was challenging to communicate specialized IT services.

Our UX Expert Review Process

Our UX expert review provides a comprehensive UX evaluation of the main design issues of a website or an app in a relatively short period of time (a few days).

As a result, we discover the main problems affecting user behavior in a negative way, causing cart abandonment, etc. Mapping the issues has its own process with the following steps:

Preliminary Research

The first step was to scrutinize the information provided by the company business development team, who is the first contact point with our clients.

We collected:

• Pain-points
• Initial value proposition ideas (as an alternative to the existing one)
• Persona outlines (2 personas, from which we choose one to work with)
• Notes from previous meetings, that helped us to understand the situation better

The marketing department on the client’s side was very helpful. Before starting the planning phase, we arranged a call to check if we had all the necessary input to kick-off the project.

UX Review Planning

Once we collected everything needed for the website UX review, we jumped to the second step. In this phase, we defined the areas and questions that needed answers:

• Website structure and main elements (Homepage, Solutions, News, About us, Contacts, Case study, and two product pages) We examined the navigation, the mental steps that the website follows, the readability, and lucidity of content on each page and a general comprehension.
• Prepared the intervention plan and questions for the experts to do the review.
• The UX review provided insights for two areas: aesthetics-related issues and design-related issues (how it looks and how it works)

Insights and feedback from the expert reviews were collected in a presentable and collaborative board. A canvas, in this case, a Miro board, was selected in order to map and pinpoint every feedback and to collaborate with other team members in real-time.

Two designers and two researchers from UX studio worked on the UX expert review. Designers focused on aesthetics and design aspects (brand, design consistency), researchers handled usability aspects (navigation, structure, mental steps, user flows).

Execution

Initial research was conducted for four different value propositions, to see which one would work best for the website. For this, we used the five-second test method with the four variations to see which value proposition described the company's profile the best.

This result was not directly connected to the review conducted by the experts.

The expert review contained a 60-minute one-on-one session with each designer and researcher. During the sessions, we collected their feedback in a Miro board.

After the evaluation, we grouped the results. In the end, we had a collection of insights for every page. The final form of the feedback insights (Homepage):

Research Data Analysis

The insights collected were grouped into two categories:

1. Design issues. These were related to the design principles and best practices, a bit “out of context”, e.g. spacing, color palette, buttons, and other mostly visual elements.
2. Issues with the website understanding and navigation were about user flows, the steps, and the way the website navigates users towards conversion.

The information nuggets were collected in the Miro board (every bit of detail), but the main learnings had to be presented separately in a more transparent and concise manner for which we used a good old fashioned PPT presentation.

Presenting Findings and Handover

The last step was to present and discuss all the findings and prepare the next steps.

We hold a longer meeting for this presentation since we had to go through the findings and discuss the possibilities.

The presentation was interactive and we discussed two main areas: the value proposition (how the website presents the services) and we went through every page in detail (focusing on design improvements and overall usability issues).

UX Review Results

As a result, we discovered the issues that caused a website misunderstanding and navigation flaws. Moreover, we figured out that the value proposition doesn’t communicate the profile of the company as it should.

The UX review was helpful for IncQueryLabs in the following way:

• Short term: correcting the minor design issues on the website, making the website more appealing.
• Long term: understanding the root cause of the main issues and forming the next steps (a new UX strategy).
• Planning the necessary steps to improve the website.

Final Takeaways

Design goes hand in hand with UX research and it is an inevitable part of the design process to produce a product that is able to meet business and user needs. It specifically applies to products that have a business need that is more difficult to understand.

If we focus on the details of the product and services, we tend to overlook the users and their perspective. The learning point from this project was that it is easy to lose users due to poor online product experience.

Thus, design should always go in line with the user research to provide the best experience for customers.

Searching for the right UX agency?

UX studio has successfully worked with over 250 companies worldwide.

Is there anything we can do for you at this moment? Get in touch with us and let’s discuss your current challenges.

Our experts would be happy to assist with the UX strategy, product and user research, UX/UI design.