Imagine owning an online store that sells various products. Thousands of customers visit your website or app in search of products that they need. They check the availability of products, add them to the cart, proceed to checkout, and then suddenly disappear. This is when you start wondering if your website has some issues.
Well, this isn’t just your and your website’s problem. It is a challenge faced by most website owners in the long run and is a reason that makes them think about conversion rate optimization. However, with many elements on-site, the real challenge is determining what requires optimization. This is where UX audit takes the spotlight. This blog lets us learn about UX audit, how and when it should be conducted, and its benefits for businesses.
What Is UX Audit?
A UX Audit, also referred to as a usability audit, evaluates a website’s or mobile app’s user interface. It is an effective tool for businesses that want to identify usability problems in their digital products. It can also help detect issues that make users abandon their shopping journey and leave the site/app.
While a UX audit cannot directly solve all the problems on a website or app, it can help businesses find answers to some profound questions and find solutions to the problems accordingly. In addition, by tackling the core problems in the product, businesses can increase their product’s conversion rates, improve its usability and address users’ objections.
When Should You Conduct A UX Audit?
Consider a UX audit as a health check-up. If your goal is to learn more about your users and grow your business faster, conducting a usability audit will benefit your business no matter when it is done. Startups who want to validate their MVPs will also find it extremely useful. You can conduct UX audits at any stage of your product’s life cycle to identify current performance issues and areas for improvement.
Conducting a thorough UX audit in the below situations can help your business greatly.
- When you redesign a website or an app that has been live for a long time, it helps assess existing user flows and detect problems and distractions that prevent users from taking the required actions.
- When you plan to develop and implement new functionality, a UX audit will help you understand if the new functionality is a valuable addition to your product and is perceived well by the users.
- When you want to validate a new product design before development. You do not require a completed product to conduct a UX audit. It can be conducted in the pre-development process, where you are still flexible to make changes that will not cause significant time and budget losses.
How To Conduct UX Audit?
There is no officially adopted methodology for conducting a UX audit, and therefore, companies and individual UX experts can approach it differently. The process can differ according to the product’s complexity, the scope of the work, and end goals. However, the general steps and ultimate goals are often similar. Here is a simple yet effective UX audit process.
1- Know The Product And Business
Initially, it is important to learn about the product and the company’s business goals before beginning the UX auditing process. Then, you can set up the key objectives and expectations for the usability and design audit. In this step, the main aim is to understand the target audience, their behavior, the parts of the product that causes misinterpretation and misunderstanding, the reasons behind the low conversion rate, and user flows that require a revamp.
Suppose the product is yet to be developed. In that case, it is highly recommended to conduct discovery research, interview potential customers to learn about their needs and behavior, and check the level of competition in your market.
This step will help businesses understand the direction of the UX audit, the research methods needed to be used, and whether the business goals are achievable.
2- Collecting Insights
After the first step is completed, UX experts will already be familiar with your product and its core problems. As a part of the usability audit process, the actual product is tested with its users to detect design flaws, areas that cause misunderstanding, which can greatly affect the product’s business performance. Multiple platforms like social media, professional networks, and user recruitment partners find the target audience. The most suitable research methods fit the business needs and recruit participants from the target audience.
The results from the usability tests are used to create or iterate the prototype and re-test it with new users. Several rounds of testing are conducted to accurately define the core problems of the product and come up with a solution that meets the users’ and businesses’ needs.
3- Compiling Findings Into The UX Audit Report
The final step of the UX audit process includes a review report from the auditor that lists out the findings and short and long-term recommendations that will help to improve the product’s usability and performance.
Benefits Of UX Audit
Understandably, conducting a usability audit will only benefit your business and your product. Here are a few notable benefits that you will get from UX auditing your product.
- Enable redesigning of product based on solid research data
- Receive clear and accurate business direction and gain new product perspective
- Gain deep knowledge of competitive market and solutions
- Get a clear understanding of user’s behavior and get to know them better
- Save money on development
- Increase profits
Conclusion
With the help of an expert UI/UX company, you can receive a professional UX audit that will help you find errors in your product that require fixing and discover new ways to improve your ROI. Continuous follow-up is crucial for any business activity. If you do not continuously check up on your products and implement suggested improvements, you will never be able to grow your business.
Quickly get in touch with a professional UX auditor and accelerate your online business.
