How to do it

1. Identify a list of services that would be either direct or related competitors to your service. Pare the list down to four or five.
2. Establish which criteria or heuristics you will use to evaluate each competing service.
3. Break down the analysis of each selected competitor into specific focal areas for evaluation. For example, how relevant are search results?
4. Use a spreadsheet to capture the evaluation and determine how the targeted services and agencies perform based on the identified heuristics.
5. Present the analysis, which should showcase areas of opportunities that you can take advantage of and design patterns you might adopt or avoid.

How to do it

1. Identify a specific user need or user question that you’d like to address.

2. Create an inventory of content on your website. Navigate through the site from the home page and note the following about every piece of content. (For repeated items like blog posts, consider capturing just a sample.)

   1. Title used in the site’s navigation for that page
   2. Title displayed on the page or item itself
   3. URL
   4. Parent page
3. Identify the main entry points for the user need you’re addressing. This could be external marketing, the homepage, a microsite, or another page.
4. From each entry point, trace the pages and tasks a user moves through until they address their need.

5. For every piece of content they might come across on that task flow, note:

   1. Author(s): who wrote or created the page
   2. Content owner(s): who ensures its credibility
   3. How often or when it was last updated
   4. Comments: qualitative assessment of what to change to better address your identified user need

How to do it

1. As a team, identify and make explicit the problem you’re trying to solve. What goals or needs aren’t being met? What measurable criteria would indicate progress toward those goals?

2. As a team, write out the hypothesis for the work you want to do to address the problem(s) you’re trying to solve. You may want to write broad hypotheses at the outset of a project and more specific hypotheses each sprint.

   Here’s a common way to structure your hypothesis:

   We believe that doing/building/creating [this] for [this user] will result in [this outcome].
   We’ll know we’re right when we see [this metric/signal].

3. Once you’ve formulated your hypothesis, consider the following harm prompt to help the team think about and guard against potential unintended consequences of your work.

   But, this could be harmful for [this user] if [this outcome happens].

4. Identify a user touchpoint that will allow you to test your hypothesis, such as external marketing, the homepage, a microsite, or something else. Test your hypothesis. If you learn something unexpected, refine your hypothesis, test again, and continue to work incrementally towards your goals.

How to do it

1. Recruit a group of three to five people familiar with heuristic evaluation methods.
   • Evaluators do not necessarily need to be designers, but they should be familiar with common usability best practices.
   • Ideally, they are not users or overly familiar with the site being evaluated.
2. Provide a set of recognized heuristics for the group to evaluate the site against.
   • The most common resource is 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design from Nielsen Norman Group.
   • The checklist for Play 3: Make it simple and intuitive from the Digital Services Playbook is also a good resource.
3. Have each person evaluate the website using the provided heuristics and document problems.
   • Optionally, have them capture a severity level and potential solution (if apparent) for each problem.
4. Review the data and prioritize problems to address.

How to do it

1. Ahead of the session, establish what you want to elicit hopes and fears about. For example, you could ask participants to focus on the whole project or that day’s workshop.
2. At the beginning of the session, create two columns labeled “Hopes” and “Fears” on a white board or large sticky pad. (In a remote setting, you can do this online using collaboration software such as Mural or Google Docs)
3. Ask participants to take 1-2 mins to write down their hopes on sticky notes (one hope per sticky note).
4. Invite participants to come up one at a time and add their “hopes” sticky notes to the board and say more about what they wrote. Have participants group their sticky notes as they add them to the board to illustrate emerging themes.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 with fears.

This format can be adapted to include other categories. For example, asking participants to write down skills and experiences can help contextualize each person’s place in the group.

How to do it

1. Run the audit.
   • Go to web.dev/measure.
   • Enter the address of the page you want to audit and press Run Audit.
   • It may take a minute or two to finish running.
   • Press the View Report link to see details about the issues that need to be addressed.
2. Share the results with your team.
   • The View Report link is a unique address you can bookmark to return to this version of the report later or share it with others. You can also download the report as an HTML file to view offline.
   • Have team members provide effort estimates for issues in their area of expertise. There may be issues relating to content, design, and development across audit categories.
   • There is no way to export the report as a spreadsheet. Review results with the team and capture issues in your work tracking system as appropriate.
   • If you log in with a Google account, Measure will save each audit so you can track changes to a page over time.
3. Work with your team to prioritize fixes.
   • Each of the problems identified impacts the overall user experience. Facilitate discussion among the team about which issues to prioritize based on the effort required and impact achieved.
4. Audit additional pages as needed.
   • In addition to the homepage, try a few other template pages, like section landing pages or article pages. Page quality will vary based on content, but focusing on a few key templates give you a sense of issues occurring across the site.

How to do it

1. Create a guide for yourself of some topics you’d like to ask about, and some specific questions as a back up. Questions will often concern the individual’s role, the organization, the individuals’ needs, and metrics for success of the project.
2. Sit down one-on-one with the participant, or two-on-one with a note-taker or joint interviewer, in a focused environment. Introduce yourself. Explain the premise for the interview as far as you can without biasing their responses.
3. Follow the conversation where the participant takes it. They will focus on their priorities and interests. Be comfortable with silences, which allow the participant to elaborate. To keep from getting entirely off course, use your interview guide to make sure you cover what you need to. Ask lots of “why is that” and “how do you do that” questions.
4. If there are other products they use or your product doesn’t have constraints imposed by prior work, observe the stakeholders using a competing product and consider a comparative analysis.

How to do it

1. Long task list: Create a long list (ex: 150-500) of tasks by consulting various data sources:
   • Behavior on the site - Google analytics, Site search queries (date range: 12 months)
   • Customer feedback channels - What are customers talking or asking about?
   • Stakeholder interviews
   • Review available past UX research
   • Comparative analysis of sites of similar products
   • Review every page of the site you are creating the task list for

   As you review the data, ask yourself what users may be trying to do on your site.

   Capture your tasks in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet should document the task, the general category it belongs to (this helps you organize your task list and makes it easier to trim the list later), the source of where you got that task, and notes.

2. Short list: Trim the list to 70 or fewer tasks:
   • Consolidate duplicative tasks
   • Work with stakeholders to shorten the list to no more than 70 tasks and finalize wording of tasks (consult task wording best practices). This can be done with collaborative workshops using a whiteboard tool.

   Plan for it to take 3-5 weeks to get to a final short list.

3. Survey: Get feedback from users. Ask users to vote on their most important tasks via survey. Collect other relevant data to cross analyze top tasks with those data points (for example, ask participants how long they have used the product. That way you can determine top tasks of new users vs. seasoned users).