The user experience is made up of a 4 factors:

Taken together, these factors constitute the main ingredients for a website’s success.

Take a brilliantly designed site that gives errors.
Or imagine a fantastic, database-driven application that, for some reason or other, is never used.
In both cases, we see that the independent elements of branding, usability, functionality and content structure aren’t necessarily indicative of a site’s success.
Only when taken together, these core elements provide the basis for the user experience.

The Need for an Objective Analysis Tool

The problem is that each of our perceptions of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a Website is, is skewed by our personal backgrounds and specialties within the industry.
Asked to evaluate a Website’s benefits and constraints, a developer, usability professional, designer or information architect may come up with an entirely different critique.

Remove your personal preferences (subjectivity) from the equation as much as possible.
Enable persons with different backgrounds (designers, developers, clients) to share a common understanding of the site.
Create ground rules for comparisons of the site to those of competitors, or past development efforts.
Provide your clients with a fact-based, visual representation of their site’s benefits and limitations.

This tool is great for this sort of analysis:

VisualPath