UXMust
Turning UX evaluation findings into clear, prioritised, and actionable improvements
The challenge
UXMust helps companies identify usability problems through heuristic evaluation. However, finding issues was only one part of the process. The existing platform produced reports, but users often did not act on them. Recommendations were difficult to interpret, progress could not be tracked, and collaboration was limited to a single point of contact.
The project aimed to redesign UXMust so that designers, product managers, developers and business stakeholders could understand findings, agree on priorities and move from evaluation to implementation more easily.
Methods
Heuristic Evaluation, Stakeholder Interview, Desk Research, Competitor Benchmarking, Semi-Structured Interviews, Thematic Analysis, Persona Development, User Stories, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Team
Kevin Otto Koit, Ayushi Raina, Zain Ul Abideen
Duration
3 Months
Research
The project followed the Double Diamond framework, moving from understanding the existing platform and its market to defining user needs, developing design concepts and testing the final prototype.
→ Existing platform evaluation
The existing UXMust platform was evaluated using its own evaluation tool after reviewing Nielsen and Norman’s usability heuristics. Additional evaluations of other websites helped identify the tool’s strengths and limitations from a user’s perspective.
→ Competitor benchmarking
Five direct competitors and two indirect competitors were analysed to understand how other platforms approached UX evaluation, reporting, prioritisation, automation and collaboration.
→ Questionnaire, interviews & thematic analysis
The questionnaire revealed how UX evaluation practices differed across professional roles, while six follow-up interviews explored what happened after evaluation reports were delivered. The findings highlighted organisational and communication barriers that often prevented UX recommendations from being implemented.
→ Persona development
The questionnaire and interview findings were translated into three personas representing a designer, a product owner, and a front-end developer. The personas reflected how each role works with UX findings, highlighting different needs for evidence, prioritisation, business impact, and implementation guidance.
→ User stories and storyboard
Four user stories were created for designers, product managers, developers, and business leaders to define the information each role needed from the platform. A storyboard then visualised the journey from receiving a complex heuristic report to understanding findings, collaborating with colleagues, and moving towards implementation.
Key Insights
→ UX reports often identified problems without helping teams solve them
The research showed that UX reports often remained unused when they were too technical, too long, or lacked clear next steps. Identifying usability issues alone was not enough—teams also needed to understand their priority, assign ownership, and track implementation.
→ Different roles needed different levels of information
Designers, product managers, developers and business stakeholders did not approach UX findings in the same way. Designers needed detailed evidence, product managers needed business impact and feasibility, developers needed implementation context, and leaders needed a concise overview of progress and results. A single static report could not serve all these needs equally well.
→ Cross-team misalignment slowed implementation
UX improvements often depended on approval and coordination across design, product, technology and leadership. Different priorities, unclear ownership and repeated discussions created delays and made it difficult to turn research findings into completed changes.
→ Reports needed to be clear, concise and actionable
Participants wanted enough evidence to trust the findings, but not so much information that the report became overwhelming. Severity, business impact and practical recommendations needed to be presented together so that teams could understand what mattered and decide what to do next.
→ Usability knowledge was not shared equally across teams
Not every user understood heuristic terminology or had experience with formal UX evaluation. Technical labels that were meaningful to a UX specialist could be confusing to a developer, manager or business stakeholder. The research showed that the platform needed to communicate findings in language that connected usability problems with their practical impact.
Design Solutions
The research shifted the project from designing another report interface towards creating a more action-oriented workspace. The final concept was built around three main scenarios: reviewing an AI-generated audit, prioritising findings and supporting the developer’s implementation flow.
→ AI-generated audit overview
Problem – Users needed a faster way to understand the overall condition of a website without reading every issue individually.
Solution – The concept introduced an overall UX summary with a visual score, severity information and an overview of key findings. Business and product impact labels were added to help designers explain why an issue mattered beyond the heuristic itself.
→ Shared team decision-making
Problem – Designers, product managers and developers often had different opinions about the effort and value of a proposed improvement.
Solution – The concept allowed several team members to contribute their effort estimates. These inputs could then support a shared “Balanced Decision,” making different professional perspectives visible within the same workflow.
→ Clear developer flow
Problem – Developers needed UX issues to be reviewed and approved before implementation, together with enough context to understand what needed to be changed without unnecessary back-and-forth.
Solution – Each issue included the violated heuristic, a relevant screenshot and a clear actionable recommendation. This gave developers more context about the problem and the proposed fix before beginning implementation.
→ Clear visual language
Problem – Large and unclear reports could create information overload, making findings more difficult to understand and communicate.
Solution – The final interface adopted a clean and professional visual style, using high-contrast colours to distinguish issue severity: red for Critical, orange for Medium and green for Low. This created a clearer visual distinction between different levels of severity across the interface.
Usability Testing
The design was evaluated in two stages using low- and high-fidelity prototypes. Early testing helped validate the overall structure and identify areas for refinement before the final design was developed. While participants found the interface intuitive, they also highlighted that some terminology and concepts were difficult to understand for users with limited experience in UX evaluation.
The high-fidelity prototype was then tested with two front-end developers with different levels of UX knowledge. The evaluation produced an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 70 (Grade B), indicating good overall usability. The sessions also showed that prior knowledge of UX significantly influenced how easily participants understood the platform. Users with less experience benefited from clearer navigation, simpler terminology, and additional guidance, such as onboarding and contextual tooltips, while users familiar with UX evaluation were able to navigate the platform confidently. These findings informed the final recommendations for improving the accessibility of the platform for a broader audience.
Outcome
The project reimagined UXMust as a collaborative platform that helps teams interpret, prioritise, and manage UX evaluation findings more effectively. Research insights and iterative prototyping were translated into an interactive high-fidelity concept that explored new ways of making usability reports clearer, more actionable, and easier to integrate into existing workflows.
The final outcome was an interactive high-fidelity prototype supported by user research and usability evaluation. The project also produced recommendations for future development, including simplifying the onboarding experience, improving guidance for users with limited UX knowledge, and validating the platform with a broader range of participants.