40% of visitors will leave a website if it doesn’t look good or work well. The same is also true for any software or app, which is a digital product or service. You need to provide a solid user experience to attract and retain your users. However, that doesn’t always happen as you plan.
A UX audit helps you find out why your users are leaving. It also allows you to close the gaps so that your product can perform like a champ once again. You can conduct an assessment for any digital product that involves user interaction.
Let’s explore more on why and how you can conduct UX audit for your product or website.
Executive Summary
User experience is a vital aspect of any digital product. If your app fails to please its users, you cannot expect your business to shine.
Your product should be able to achieve its goals and make user interaction as seamless as possible.
"The process creates happy users, boosts conversions, and increases customer satisfaction."
A UX audit helps businesses find out why their app or website is lacking in UX. The audit tests products against different metrics and uses data analysis to unearth bugs and errors. Businesses can also get practical recommendations to fix each issue and improve user interactions.
What is UX Audit?
A user experience audit is a professional evaluation of the usability of your digital product. It helps you identify areas your users are experiencing difficulty in interacting with your app. In addition, you can assess your product for various metrics that tell you where it lacks.
Generally, the audit comes with a set of recommendations to improve your user experience. It can be a time-consuming process for complex apps and take a few weeks to a few months.
What Problems can a UX Audit Solve?
Why should you conduct a user experience audit? How can it help you improve your value proposition?
Let’s find out what problems can a professional UX assessment resolve:
People Leaving Your Website
Poor user experience can cause people to quit your app or website. You can discover why your users are leaving with a UX design audit and usability testing. As a result, a website UX audit can reduce bounce rate.
Customers Switching to Competitors
Your customers will leave you for your competitors if your product leads to unpleasant experiences. An audit can help you find out what is causing those undesired experiences.
Low Conversions
Are your conversions at an all-time low?
Low conversions are evident when your users are not satisfied with how your product works. Going for a professional audit can provide adept recommendations to increase conversions.
Low User Satisfaction
Your users will be unhappy when you fail to meet their expectations. Auditing your user experience can help you realize where your product is creating hiccups. In addition, you can get advice on solutions to improve your performance.
When to Conduct a UX Design Audit?
A range of situations calls for usability testing of your product. You should go for a UX/UI audit when:
Users Complain about Poor User Experience
You need an audit for your product if your users complain about your product. They may leave negative feedback about your user interface or specific workflows.
"Low ratings can also be an indicator of poor customer satisfaction."
In these situations, auditing your UX is necessary.
Your Product Fails to Meet Business Objectives
Every product has specific goals it needs to achieve for business success. However, a poor user experience can upset users and hamper your goals. So, if your product is not meeting its objectives, you need to think twice.
You Want to Update Your Product or Add New Features
Every business needs to update products or add new features to stay competitive. However, a data-driven approach is much better for upgrading your app than relying on guesswork.
A user experience audit can help you with insights to update your product to meet user expectations. You can find out what your customers want and then use the data to update or add new features. It makes your success more likely!
Redesigning Your Product
Digital products need to keep up with the latest trends. As a result, you may need to redesign your app from time to time.
Businesses can go for an audit when redesigning for a data-driven approach. It will provide the areas of improvement and issues you need to tackle before you redesign. Based on the insights, you can make a better interface that makes your users happy.
You Notice a Drop in Your Revenues
A drop in your revenues means something is wrong with your product. Your audit can go a long way to account for the loss in revenues by discovering the reasons. You can track all the areas where your product is not able to keep up to satisfy users. Plus, you can get the solutions to get your profits up and running.
You Experience Any Issues Discussed in Above Section
You should assess your user experience if you experience any of the above problems. It means there is something wrong with your product that is not digesting well with your users. So, your audit will help you get to the bottom of things and find out the real issue.
What are the Benefits of a UX Audit?
Benefits from a UX audit can help you attract and retain more users. You can deliver a great user and customer experience and make your product competitive once again.
The benefits of UX audit include:
Satisfied Users
Your product works the way they expect, which boosts satisfaction and retention. Everyone is able to achieve their tasks, and your app also fulfills its objectives.
"A better user experience works wonders to make your users happy."
This creates a win-win situation for both the business and the customers.
Loyal Customers
Your users will become loyal customers once your product is able to please them. They will prefer your brand over competitors for its high user satisfaction. Additionally, they are likely to spend more as they are your loyal customers.
You will always keep generating repeat orders for uninterrupted business and profits.
More Conversions and Revenues
Businesses will be able to boost conversions with a user experience audit. It will reveal areas where you can improve your product. The move will help you enable your users to perform tasks with ease. Your product will become a pleasure to use and offer optimum usability.
As a result, your users will love your brand and convert more.
High Customer Retention
Resolving issues with your product has now given you more satisfied users. Your customers are also happy with your services and turned into loyal patrons. They come back to you with more orders and love to do business with you.
"You can stop worrying about your churn rate and expect more people to become your vocal advocates."
All these factors help you improve customer retention rates.
Improved Brand Awareness
People will come to know your brand as the one that always puts users first. They will talk about the pleasant experience of using your product and act as your marketing tool.
"Offering an excellent user experience will help your business build awareness and credibility."
Therefore, your brand will receive recognition and experience growth.
How to Perform a UX Audit?
You need a professional UX designer to conduct a UX audit. Plus, a UI designer can also add more insight to your UX auditing. Generally, professional agencies conduct an audit and provide actionable recommendations.
Here is a look at the UX audit process:
1. Analyzing User Experience
The first step for conducting a UX audit for the product is to analyze the user experience. A UX expert will try to find out if the logic of user interaction is flawed in any way. Additionally, the auditor will check for things like:
- UX/UI bugs present in your product
- How your users feel while interacting with your app
- The intuitiveness of your user interface
- Consistency of user flows
The stage may use several UX tools to assess how your product performs. Heat maps can also help you realize what is making your users upset.
2. Evaluating Content
The content of your app or website is vital to ensuring a pleasant user interaction. Poor or unoptimized content can make your users leave and go for your competitors.
Your UX audit team will evaluate if your content aligns with your audience preferences. Auditors will also try to assess if your content is able to help your product meet its goals. Additionally, they will check the ease of onboarding your product provides.
They also scrutinize your information architecture and look for additional cues. For example, they may check if users are able to seek assistance to perform a vital action.
3. Tracking Technical Errors
A range of technical issues can make your app or website perform below par. These errors hamper your user experience and make your users leave. For example, your bounce rate can increase to 32% if your page loading time becomes 3 seconds from 1 second.
As a result, your UX audit will also focus on tracking any technical error to improve performance.
4. Summary Documentation
The deliverables of your auditing will include a comprehensive summary document. It will list all the problems uncovered by the auditors. Each problem will have an explanation that helps businesses understand what went wrong.
In addition, your summary document will include solutions to every problem. You can work with your audit agency to implement the solutions to improve your user experience.
Now that you know how to do a UX audit, here is a checklist to help you make the most of it.
UX Audit Checklist
Keep this UX audit checklist handy when you perform a UX audit. Include analytics and data to gain a deeper understanding:
- Analytics and insights
- Competitive analysis
- UX analysis
- Content evaluation
- Bugs and technical errors
UX Audit Case Study
You must be eager to look at a real-life UX audit example. We will take up one of our case studies to show how the process helps you offer better user experiences.
Teachinguide, a SaaS education company, wanted to overhaul its platform for more engagement. We were called in to find out what their website lacked and the way forward for engaging users.
Our team started by getting to know their business and ideal customers. Then we developed a plan with actionable steps to implement right away. The roadmap looked something like this:
- User experience analysis
- Assessment of on-site content
- A study of technical glitches
Our audit discovered quite a few issues with Teachinguide’s product that we are presenting below. We are also including the solutions we recommended for each problem.
Issues:
- Small icons with poor visibility
- Users cannot find a clear separation where submenu items are placed
- No hover condition for buttons
- Inadequate selection for categories column
- Adding a course for monitoring is complex
- Key content is not discoverable at first
Solutions:
- Simplify icons and enlarge them
- Small paragraphs for nesting for improved visibility hierarchy
- Addition of hover condition
- Implement categories as colored tag format for better navigability
- Add text to add buttons (for courses) for improved navigability
- Changing site design to highlight key content.
Likewise, businesses can discover bugs and flaws that haunt their products and hamper user satisfaction. They can follow the recommendations of the auditor to resolve issues and grow their business.
How much does a UX Audit Cost?
Now you must be wondering how much does a UX audit cost. The actual price depends on a range of factors, like who you work with and the scope of your usability audit. In addition, UX audit costs may be higher for complex apps and websites.
Businesses can work with freelancers or agencies to assess their products. Often, agencies are a better choice due to the resources and expertise you can get. For example, you can have experienced UX experts and designers working on your project. The auditors may also hire participants to test your app for usability issues.
As a result, your audit is far more professional and effective. Working with an agency may need you to spend $1,000 on your auditing.
Conduct a UX Audit Today
We can conduct a UX audit to help you improve your user experience. If you have any of the issues we discussed, get in touch with us for a comprehensive user experience audit. We have already given you a glimpse of how we work in the audit process we highlighted above.
Our UX/UI team uses advanced resources and a special framework for auditing. Known as the HEART framework, it helps us dive deep and uncover what ails your users. The framework consists of four areas we scrutinize:
Happiness: We test various metrics to find out how happy your users are with your product.
Engagement: Is your app able to engage users? We use our framework to find the answer to this important question.
Adoption: We evaluate your installations and various metrics to determine adoption rates and popularity.
Retention: A part of our audit focuses on how competent your product is in retaining users.
Task success: Are users able to achieve the desired task with your product? The answer will help us improve your customer experiences.
Our team of UX/UI designers is ready to dissect your app and provide the right recommendations. Contact us today for conducting a UX audit for the product.
Book your UX audit now to boost conversions.
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