User Experience Audit Checklist for Sitecore & SharePoint 2025

In the competitive digital landscape, a seamless user experience (UX) isn't a luxury; it's the engine of growth. For enterprises leveraging powerful platforms like Sitecore and SharePoint, a periodic UX audit is critical to maximizing ROI, enhancing user satisfaction, and staying ahead. Many organizations invest heavily in their Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) but overlook the small friction points that accumulate into significant barriers for users, hindering conversions and engagement.

This comprehensive user experience audit checklist provides a structured framework specifically tailored for complex enterprise systems. We'll dive deep into actionable strategies, moving beyond generic advice to offer concrete steps you can implement on your Sitecore or SharePoint platform today. From assessing navigation and information architecture to analyzing mobile responsiveness and form conversions, this guide covers the critical pillars of a successful digital presence. By systematically evaluating your platform, you can pinpoint specific areas for improvement that directly impact user behavior and business outcomes.

To truly unlock peak performance and ensure a flawless digital experience, it's essential to not only audit existing systems but also to be aware of the latest trends. Staying current with emerging standards can provide a valuable lens for your audit, and the 10 User Experience Design Best Practices for 2025 offers excellent insights into what users will expect next. This guide, backed by a decade of DXP expertise, will empower you to identify issues, prioritize fixes, and unlock your platform's full potential, ensuring your digital investment delivers measurable results.

1. Navigation and Information Architecture Assessment

At the core of any effective digital platform lies its Information Architecture (IA) and navigation system. This element of a user experience audit checklist is paramount because it dictates how easily users can find information and complete their goals. An assessment in this area evaluates the logical structure of your content, the clarity of your menus, and the overall findability of key features, ensuring a seamless and intuitive journey for your audience.

A poorly structured site, especially on complex platforms like Sitecore where content is deeply interconnected, can lead to high bounce rates, user frustration, and abandoned tasks. Similarly, a sprawling SharePoint intranet with inconsistent site structures and confusing labeling will hinder employee productivity. Conversely, a well-designed navigation system, powered by a logical content tree in Sitecore or a thoughtfully planned hub-and-spoke model in SharePoint, guides users effortlessly, enhancing satisfaction and conversion rates.

How to Audit Your Navigation and IA

To conduct a thorough assessment, you need to analyze how users move through your digital ecosystem. This involves examining menus, labels, breadcrumbs, and internal search functionality to ensure they are logical, consistent, and predictable.

• Menu Structure and Labeling: Are your navigation labels clear and unambiguous? Do they accurately reflect the content behind them? For Sitecore, this means ensuring your navigation components correctly render the item hierarchy. For SharePoint, it involves auditing global and hub navigations for clarity.
• User Flow Analysis: Use analytics tools like Sitecore Analytics or SharePoint's site usage reports to identify common user paths. Look for drop-off points or instances where users frequently backtrack. These are red flags indicating navigational confusion.
• Cross-Device Consistency: Your navigation must be equally effective on desktop, tablet, and mobile. In Sitecore, this means ensuring your rendering variants and component styles adapt gracefully. In SharePoint, modern sites are responsive by default, but custom web parts or branding can introduce issues that need testing.
• Search Functionality: Test your internal search with common, misspelled, and long-tail queries. A robust search, whether it’s Sitecore Search or Microsoft Search for SharePoint, should provide relevant results, offer suggestions, and handle errors gracefully.

The following infographic illustrates a simplified, three-step process for auditing key navigation components.

This sequential flow ensures that you first validate the primary navigation structure before moving on to secondary cues and, finally, the fallback search mechanism.

Putting Insights into Action

Once you have identified navigational weaknesses, the next step is implementation. For a Sitecore project, this might involve restructuring the content tree and updating data sources for navigation components. In SharePoint, this could mean reorganizing sites into logical hubs or refining term sets in the term store for metadata-driven navigation.

For organizations managing vast amounts of content, mastering IA is critical. To dive deeper into structuring complex digital properties, you can explore detailed guidance on best practices for enterprise IA design.

This video from Nielsen Norman Group provides a deeper look into the principles of Information Architecture:

2. Page Load Speed and Performance Analysis

In today's fast-paced digital environment, performance is not just a technical metric; it is a fundamental component of the user experience. This element of a user experience audit checklist focuses on the technical evaluation of your website's speed, responsiveness, and efficiency. It involves analyzing everything from server response times and image optimization to code minification, identifying bottlenecks that frustrate users and harm conversion rates.

Slow-loading pages are a primary cause of user abandonment. For instance, the BBC found it lost an additional 10% of users for every extra second its site took to load. On platforms like Sitecore, where dynamic personalization, complex component rendering, and XM Cloud's edge delivery can impact speed, a performance analysis is not just beneficial; it's critical. Similarly, a SharePoint intranet bogged down by large files and inefficient web parts can cripple employee productivity.

How to Audit Your Page Speed and Performance

A comprehensive performance audit goes beyond a simple speed test. It requires a detailed analysis of all the elements that contribute to the final render time, from the initial server request to the final script execution. This helps identify specific, actionable areas for improvement.

• Core Web Vitals Assessment: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to measure your Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift). These metrics are crucial for both SEO and user experience.
• Image and Media Optimization: Are your images served in modern formats like WebP? For Sitecore, this means checking how the Digital Asset Management (DAM) or media library handles image renditions. For SharePoint, ensure users are not uploading massive, unoptimized images directly to document libraries.
• Code Efficiency: Audit your CSS and JavaScript files. Unused code, render-blocking scripts, and an excess of HTTP requests can significantly delay how quickly a page becomes interactive. Minifying these resources is a standard best practice.
• Server and Caching Strategy: Evaluate your server's response time (Time to First Byte). A robust caching strategy, especially in complex CMS environments like Sitecore (HTML caching, component caching) or SharePoint, is essential for serving content quickly. For Sitecore XM Cloud, leveraging the Experience Edge CDN is vital.

The following video from Google Chrome Developers offers an excellent overview of how to approach web performance and why it matters so much for user engagement.

Putting Insights into Action

After identifying performance bottlenecks, create a prioritized action plan. Start with high-impact, low-effort fixes like image compression and enabling Gzip compression on your server. For Sitecore, this could mean fine-tuning caching settings or optimizing slow-performing renderings. In SharePoint, it might involve replacing a custom web part with a more efficient out-of-the-box alternative.

Implementing lazy loading for images and videos that are "below the fold" can dramatically improve initial page load times. For enterprises managing feature-rich digital experience platforms, a continuous performance monitoring strategy is key to long-term success. To learn how to implement these changes effectively, you can explore in-depth strategies for how to optimize website performance.

3. Mobile Responsiveness and Cross-Device Compatibility

With mobile traffic consistently surpassing desktop, ensuring a seamless experience across all devices is no longer a luxury but a fundamental requirement. This component of a user experience audit checklist involves a rigorous examination of how well your digital platform adapts to various screen sizes, resolutions, and operating systems. The goal is to guarantee consistent functionality and visual integrity whether a user is on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop.

A non-responsive design can be catastrophic for user engagement, leading to high bounce rates and diminished brand perception. For Sitecore implementations, this means ensuring that all custom components and layouts built with technologies like SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator) are fully responsive. For SharePoint, while modern pages are inherently responsive, custom branding or web parts can easily break the experience on smaller screens.

How to Audit Your Responsiveness

Auditing for cross-device compatibility requires a multi-faceted approach that goes beyond simple browser resizing. You need to simulate and test real-world user scenarios on a variety of hardware and software combinations to uncover hidden friction points.

• Adopt a Mobile-First Mindset: Design for the smallest screen first and then progressively enhance the experience for larger screens. In Sitecore development, this means component design should prioritize mobile UX from the start. SharePoint's mobile app is a key channel, so the intranet experience must be optimized for it.
• Real-Device Testing: While browser emulators are useful for quick checks, they cannot replicate the nuances of real-world device performance, touch interactions, or specific operating system quirks. Test on a range of actual iOS and Android devices to identify genuine usability issues.
• Interaction and Target Size Analysis: Ensure all interactive elements like buttons, links, and form fields are easily tappable. A critical part of ensuring cross-device compatibility, and avoiding a jumbled mess on different screens, involves implementing robust responsive design best practices. A key tenet is making touch targets at least 44x44 pixels to prevent user frustration.
• Performance Across Devices: Analyze load times and performance metrics on different devices and network conditions. Mobile users are particularly sensitive to slow-loading pages, so optimizing images, scripts, and stylesheets for mobile is crucial for maintaining engagement.

Putting Insights into Action

Once you've identified responsiveness gaps, the next step is to implement a robust design and development strategy. For enterprise-level platforms like Sitecore, this involves leveraging the platform's adaptive design capabilities to deliver contextually relevant experiences across different devices. In Sitecore SXA, this can be managed through responsive grid settings and device-specific rendering rules.

Prioritize fixing issues that impact the largest segments of your mobile audience first, using analytics data to guide your decisions. For instance, if a checkout form is unusable on a specific screen size that a significant portion of your users have, that should be your top priority. Organizations using advanced DXP solutions can explore in-depth guides on how to build responsive layouts with AEM to ensure their components and templates are fully adaptive.

This video from Google Chrome Developers offers a modern perspective on building responsive interfaces for today's web:

4. Content Quality and Readability Assessment

Content is the vehicle for communication with your audience, and its quality directly impacts user engagement and conversion. This element of a user experience audit checklist moves beyond grammar and spelling to evaluate how effectively your content speaks to users. The assessment covers language clarity, visual hierarchy, typography, and overall information presentation to ensure your message is not just seen but understood and acted upon.

An interface with convoluted jargon or dense, unformatted text can intimidate users, causing them to abandon your site. This is particularly critical for platforms built on powerful DXP systems like Sitecore, where personalized content must be clear and compelling to be effective. Within a SharePoint intranet, clear, concise content is essential for efficient knowledge sharing and communication.

How to Audit Your Content and Readability

A thorough content audit involves analyzing both what you say and how you present it. The goal is to ensure every piece of text, from a headline to a button label, is clear, concise, and aligned with your brand voice and user expectations.

• Clarity and Simplicity: Is your language free of technical jargon and corporate-speak? For internal SharePoint sites, this means avoiding department-specific acronyms without explanation. For public-facing Sitecore sites, simplify complex product descriptions.
• Scannability and Hierarchy: Users rarely read every word. Audit your use of headings (H1, H2, H3), short paragraphs, bullet points, and bold text. In Sitecore's Experience Editor, ensure content authors are using rich text editor styles correctly to maintain a consistent hierarchy.
• Tone and Voice Consistency: Does your content maintain a consistent tone across all pages and components? A Sitecore-powered portal should feel cohesive, whether it's a blog post or a personalized call-to-action delivered by Sitecore Personalize. A SharePoint communication site should maintain a professional yet accessible tone.
• Action-Oriented Copy: Examine your calls-to-action (CTAs). Are they specific and compelling? "Learn More" is generic; "Get Your Free UX Audit Checklist" tells the user exactly what they will get, increasing the likelihood of a click.

This systematic review helps identify friction points caused by poor communication, ensuring your content supports rather than hinders the user journey.

Putting Insights into Action

After identifying content weaknesses, the next step is to refine and test. A/B testing different headlines or CTA copy using Sitecore's optimization features can provide quantitative data on what resonates best with your audience.

For organizations managing complex content ecosystems, developing a content strategy and style guide is essential for maintaining quality and consistency. For those leveraging Sitecore, this guide can be integrated into the content authoring workflow with validation rules and help texts to ensure all contributors adhere to the same high standards. For SharePoint, this involves training and governance for site owners and content creators.

This video from Nielsen Norman Group discusses the importance of writing for the web and how users read online:

5. Form Design and Conversion Optimization

Forms are the critical final step in many user journeys, from signing up for a newsletter to completing a complex purchase. This element of a user experience audit checklist is vital because a poorly designed form can be the single biggest barrier to conversion. An audit in this area evaluates everything from field organization and input types to error validation and submission processes, with the goal of minimizing friction and reducing form abandonment.

A cumbersome form, especially on enterprise platforms like Sitecore where forms are used for everything from lead generation to personalized content delivery via Sitecore Forms, can directly impact revenue and data collection. In SharePoint, inefficient forms built with Power Apps or legacy InfoPath can frustrate employees and hinder business processes. A streamlined form experience, however, can significantly increase completion rates and user satisfaction.

How to Audit Your Form Design and Usability

To conduct a thorough form audit, you must analyze every interaction a user has with the form, identifying points of hesitation, confusion, or frustration. This involves scrutinizing the form's layout, clarity of instructions, and the feedback it provides to the user.

• Field Minimization and Logical Grouping: Is every field absolutely necessary? Unnecessary fields increase cognitive load and abandonment. Group related fields together under clear headings (e.g., "Contact Information," "Shipping Address") to create a logical flow.
• Inline Validation and Error Messaging: Does the form provide real-time feedback as the user types? Inline validation prevents users from reaching the end only to find multiple errors. Error messages should be clear, concise, and helpful, explaining what is wrong and how to fix it.
• Input Types and Smart Defaults: Are you using the most appropriate input types? Use date pickers for dates, sliders for ranges, and steppers for quantities. For platforms like Sitecore, leverage user profile data from Sitecore CDP to pre-populate known information, significantly reducing user effort. For SharePoint lists, configure column types appropriately.
• Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): Is the submission button clearly visible, descriptive, and positioned logically? The CTA label should reflect the action, such as "Request a Demo" or "Complete Your Purchase," instead of a generic "Submit."

Putting Insights into Action

After identifying usability issues, the next step is to redesign and test your forms. In Sitecore, you can A/B test different versions of a form to see which performs best. For multi-step forms, ensure a progress indicator is visible so users know how much is left to complete.

Optimizing forms is a core component of turning user interest into tangible business outcomes. To explore this topic further and enhance your digital strategy, you can find more information on best practices for website conversion rate optimization.

6. Accessibility and Inclusive Design Compliance

At its core, a superior user experience is an inclusive one. Accessibility and inclusive design are crucial components of any modern user experience audit checklist, ensuring your digital platform is usable by everyone, including people with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive disabilities. This audit evaluates your platform's adherence to established standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), moving beyond mere technical compliance to embrace the principles of inclusive design.

Neglecting accessibility not only excludes a significant portion of the population but also exposes organizations to legal risks and brand damage. For platforms like Sitecore and SharePoint, which often serve large, diverse audiences (both public and internal), ensuring accessibility is a business-critical requirement. An accessible site is also inherently better for SEO and overall usability for all users.

How to Audit for Accessibility and Inclusivity

A thorough accessibility audit involves a combination of automated testing, manual checks, and, most importantly, testing with real users who rely on assistive technologies. The goal is to identify and rectify barriers that prevent equitable access to your content and functionality.

• Semantic HTML and ARIA Roles: Scrutinize your site's underlying code. Does it use semantic HTML5 elements (e.g., <nav>, <main>, <button>) correctly? Are ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles used appropriately to provide context for dynamic components, especially in complex interfaces built on platforms like Sitecore XP?
• Keyboard-Only Navigation: Can users access and operate every interactive element, including menus, forms, and modals, using only the tab, enter, and arrow keys? This is a fundamental test for motor accessibility.
• Color Contrast and Visual Cues: Use tools to check that text and background color combinations meet the WCAG 2.1 AA minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1. Ensure that color is not the only means of conveying information; use icons, text labels, or patterns as well.
• Assistive Technology Testing: Test your platform using screen readers like NVDA or JAWS. This process reveals how your content is announced and whether interactive elements are properly labeled, which is critical for users with visual impairments.

Putting Insights into Action

Addressing accessibility issues requires a methodical approach, starting with the most critical barriers. Begin by generating an automated report using tools like WAVE or Axe to identify low-hanging fruit, then move to manual testing.

Incorporating accessibility from the start is the most effective strategy. For Sitecore users, this means configuring Rich Text Editor profiles to enforce heading structures and alt text for images, ensuring content creators follow best practices by default. For SharePoint, this involves using accessible site templates and providing training on creating accessible content. For more detailed guidance on building accessible digital experiences from the ground up, the resources from advocates like Léonie Watson and the TPGi team are invaluable.

This video from A11ycasts explains the crucial role of keyboard accessibility in web development:

7. User Flow and Task Completion Analysis

Beyond individual pages and components, a critical part of any user experience audit checklist is analyzing the complete journey a user takes to achieve a goal. User Flow and Task Completion Analysis evaluates these pathways, identifying friction points, inefficiencies, and drop-off rates in critical processes. This assessment is vital because a beautiful interface is useless if users cannot successfully complete their primary tasks.

A disjointed user flow, particularly on platforms like Sitecore where personalization can create multiple journey variations, leads directly to user abandonment and lost conversions. On a SharePoint intranet, an overly complex process for submitting an expense report or finding a policy document wastes employee time and causes frustration. A streamlined task completion flow, on the other hand, creates a frictionless experience that builds user confidence and loyalty.

How to Audit Your User Flows

To effectively audit your user flows, you must map out the ideal paths for key tasks and compare them against real user behavior data. This involves identifying all the steps a user must take and pinpointing where the process breaks down or causes confusion.

• Map Critical User Journeys: Start by flowcharting the primary tasks on your site. For Sitecore, this could be a customer registration and purchase flow. For SharePoint, it might be the process for a new employee onboarding. This visualization will immediately highlight overly complex or redundant steps.
• Analyze Behavioral Analytics: Use tools like Sitecore Analytics or SharePoint's audit logs to track how users actually navigate these flows. Look for high exit rates on specific pages within a journey, unexpected loops where users move back and forth, or unusually long times spent on a single step. These are clear indicators of friction.
• Simplify and Consolidate Steps: Can a five-step form be reduced to three? Can information be pre-populated for logged-in users? For example, in a Sitecore Commerce environment, simplifying the checkout flow by combining shipping and billing information entry can significantly reduce cart abandonment.
• Provide Clear Guidance: Use progress bars, clear calls-to-action (CTAs), and concise instructions to guide users through multi-step processes. Ensure users always know where they are in the flow and what the next step is.

Putting Insights into Action

Once you have identified problematic user flows, the goal is to streamline them. A/B testing is an excellent method for validating changes. For instance, in Sitecore, you could test a single-page checkout against a multi-step process to see which performs better for your audience.

User session recordings and heatmaps provide qualitative context to your quantitative data, showing you exactly where users struggle. For complex, personalized journeys common in Sitecore XP, this analysis is not just a best practice; it's essential for ensuring every user segment has an optimized path to conversion. For more insights on mapping user journeys in a sophisticated digital ecosystem, consider reviewing best practices on customer journey mapping within Sitecore.

7-Point User Experience Audit Comparison

Transforming Insights into Action: Your Next Steps

You have now journeyed through a comprehensive user experience audit checklist, a powerful tool designed to illuminate the path toward a more intuitive, efficient, and engaging digital platform. This is not merely a list to be checked off; it is a diagnostic framework for understanding the intricate relationship between your users and your digital ecosystem. From the structural logic of your information architecture to the granular details of form field validation, each point represents an opportunity to reduce friction and build trust.

The real transformation, however, begins now. The insights gleaned from your audit are the raw materials. The true value emerges when you forge them into a strategic, actionable roadmap for tangible improvement. A completed audit is a moment of clarity, not a finish line.

From Data to Decisions: Prioritizing Your Roadmap

Your audit likely uncovered a wide range of issues, from minor annoyances to critical barriers. The challenge is deciding where to begin. A common pitfall is either tackling everything at once, leading to resource strain, or focusing only on the easiest fixes, which may not move the needle on key business metrics. A more strategic approach involves a pragmatic prioritization matrix.

Categorize your findings based on two key axes:

1. User Impact: How significantly does this issue affect the user's ability to complete their goal or their overall perception of your brand? A broken checkout button has a high impact, while a slightly off-brand color on a rarely visited page has a low impact.
2. Implementation Effort: What is the required investment in terms of time, technical resources, and budget to implement a solution? Fixing a typo is a low-effort task, whereas overhauling your entire navigation structure is a high-effort endeavor.

This creates four distinct quadrants to guide your action plan:

• High-Impact, Low-Effort (Quick Wins): These are your immediate priorities. Address these first to build momentum, demonstrate value quickly, and deliver immediate improvements to the user experience. Examples include clarifying call-to-action button text, fixing broken links, or simplifying a confusing form field.
• High-Impact, High-Effort (Major Projects): These are strategic initiatives that often require significant planning and resources, such as a platform migration, a complete redesign of the user flow, or implementing personalized content with Sitecore Personalize. These should be scoped, planned, and integrated into your long-term product roadmap.
• Low-Impact, Low-Effort (Fill-in Tasks): These are minor improvements that can be addressed when resources are available or bundled together in maintenance sprints.
• Low-Impact, High-Effort (Re-evaluate Later): These items should be placed on the back burner. The return on investment is too low to justify the significant effort required.

The Continuous Improvement Cycle: Beyond the One-Time Audit

A user experience audit checklist is most powerful when it becomes part of a continuous, cyclical process rather than a one-time event. User expectations evolve, technology advances, and business goals shift. Your digital platform must adapt in tandem.

Embrace an iterative loop of Analyze > Implement > Measure > Learn.

After implementing changes based on your initial audit, use analytics tools and user feedback mechanisms to measure their impact. Did the conversion rate for your primary form increase after you simplified it? Have bounce rates on key landing pages decreased since you improved page load speeds? This data-driven approach validates your efforts and provides fresh insights that fuel the next cycle of analysis, turning your UX practice from a reactive project into a proactive, ongoing program of excellence.

For organizations leveraging sophisticated Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) like Sitecore or SharePoint, this process has added layers of complexity and opportunity. The deep personalization and content management capabilities within Sitecore, for instance, mean that UX improvements are not just about static page layouts. They are about optimizing dynamic, personalized user journeys. A thorough audit in this context must account for component reusability, personalization rule effectiveness, and the seamless integration of data from Sitecore CDP to deliver truly contextual experiences. This is where specialized expertise becomes not just a benefit, but a necessity.

Navigating the complexities of a comprehensive UX audit and implementing meaningful changes on platforms like Sitecore and SharePoint requires deep technical and strategic expertise. Kogifi specializes in unlocking the full potential of these ecosystems, translating audit findings into powerful, performance-driving platform enhancements. Connect with Kogifi to see how our expert guidance can transform your user experience audit checklist from a document into your roadmap for digital dominance.