Every business that provides digital goods and services should aim to increase conversion rates, revenue, user happiness, retention, and brand loyalty while lowering churn, bounce rate, uninstalls, and support requests.
Through search, social media, references, media articles, or marketing initiatives, potential consumers find your website or app. They go through the website, some may download the app, investigate the features, and use the service for a while before giving up on it completely.
Or, in some cases, you might have a product that has already attracted some users. But neither their number nor how often they are used is growing. Also, people stop using your website or app or use it less often. Even if you put a lot of money into marketing campaigns, it doesn’t show up in usage or sales.
The bad user experience of your app or website may be one of the main causes of situations like this. The stakeholders may be aware of some of the product’s bottlenecks, but they often don’t know what needs to be changed, how to make those changes, or when to make them in their product or service. This is where a qualified UX Audit can save the day.
Let us look into the UX audit in detail.
What is UX Audit?
A UX Audit or Usability Audit is a way to look at how an app or website makes its users feel. UX audits help find user problems in digital products and usability problems that lead to the problems.
UX Audit gives suggestions for how to improve the user experience to boost conversions, increase revenue, improve customer loyalty, and reduce churn rate, bounce rate, cart abandonment, uninstalls, etc.
What Does a UX Audit Impart?
UX audit will help you answer the most important questions, like:
- What works and what doesn’t work in an app or website?
- What do the data tell us about the user experience and how easy it is to use?
- What are the key metrics and KPIs that need to be tracked all the time?
- Strategies that have been tried before and how they affected metrics.
Why Should a UX Audit be Conducted?
UX audit helps make a product’s user experience better, which makes customers happier because they’re no longer frustrated or confused by it.
The exercise will help the people involved make decisions that are based on research and facts. This will lead to lower costs for getting new customers and helping them, as well as higher customer retention rates.
Who Should do a UX Audit?
A UX audit is most likely to help organizations that don’t have a dedicated UX team. This is because companies with an in-house team usually evaluate the product and the user experience as a continuous process.
For the best results, it’s best to have an outside UX agency do the audit since the internal team will find it hard to step away from the product and will likely make biased decisions.
Scenarios Where a UX Audit is Conducted
A UX audit can be conducted at many stages of the product’s life cycle to recognize the performance and usability issues at that time.
- During a redesign of the product – A UX audit will help to evaluate existing user flows, and trace problems or distractions that prevent users from completing their goals.
- During the development and implementing new features – Conducting a UX audit at this juncture will help to understand how feasible the new features are and how much the users need them.
- Validate new product design before development – UX audit can be conducted on novel product ideas (MVP) even before developing them into a project. This will help to make changes that will not cause significant time and budget losses.
How to Conduct UX Audit
Even though there isn’t a set way to do it, and each company or UX professional do it differently depending on the complexity of the product, the scope of the work, and the goals, there are some general steps that are taken in the audit, and the goals are usually the same.
Let us look into the common steps followed
1. Understanding Business Goals
Understanding the product and the business goal of the company makes it possible to do a UX audit. This information helps figure out the goal of the design audit and how useful the product is.
Interviews with key members of the organization, such as product managers, developers, marketers, salespeople, and customer service representatives, are likely to provide more insights into the product than surveys among stakeholders of the organization that are conducted to cover every aspect of the product.
Every interview has the goal of learning what the subject thinks about the advantages and disadvantages of the product. These distinct perspectives help identify the fundamental actions that need to be followed to enhance the product and expand the company.
2. Understand The Users
User personas are made to learn more about the users. Some businesses know a lot about their customers, which they may have found out by doing their research. With this information, user personas that represent the target customers can be made.
There is no set number of people who will be talked to. Most of the time, the product is given to the people chosen for the interview and they are asked about their experience with it. There are different ways to conduct an interview. These have different levels of detail and can be used based on what you want.
3. Understand The User’s Objectives
A user flow must be created using the data collected from the users. The many features and functions of the product establish user objectives. Also outlined are the measures that need to be followed to accomplish these objectives. Additionally, this approach needs to pinpoint any potential trouble spots or stumbling blocks for the user.
Based on information regarding user objectives acquired through stakeholder interviews, user surveys, and/or user interviews, these user flows should be created.
4. Analytics
Most businesses rely on the numbers that analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Woopra, etc. give them. This data tells us who is using the product and what they are doing when they are using it.
It’s a good idea to add to the data from analytics with tools that do different things, like heat mapping and other things that give you more advanced analytics. The data could be used to figure out what tools they use and how the product is used over time.
5. Systematize Findings and Give Recommendations
The information gathered during the audit should be examined, summarized, and assembled into a report that clearly explains the conclusions to the stakeholders. The report includes useful recommendations that provide precise answers to the issues raised during the audit.
Each proposal should make it obvious how it may be put into practice and what it will accomplish to further company and user objectives. The most efficient approach to deliver the results and suggestions is via site maps, wireframes, prototypes, or other visual tools. It’s best not to be excessively critical while making suggestions.
Conclusion
In short, conducting a UX Audit is beneficial for any organization as it helps to understand the acceptance of their website/app design. Furthermore, with the help of UX Audit, one can make required to the existing design and make it more user-friendly. AppleTech’s web design and development professionals can assist you with your website redesigning and development needs.
