Why every business needs a UX audit and how to do it right?

When it comes to user experience, even the greatest brands tend to overlook and make mistakes. There are many examples out there, from poor product landing pages and checkout processes that don’t convert to self-serve experiences that frustrate even more than they resolve. As companies solidify their digital presence, seamless UX is more important than ever.

However, despite the rise of the digital economy, many organizations still underinvest in their products and services' user experience. While many pride themselves on customer-focused, deprioritizing the user experience can lead to unintended results.

Downplaying user experience can lead to significant long-term issues, diminishing user engagement and satisfaction and ultimately impacting the product's success and growth potential.

Often, companies need to identify the pain points with their digital products as customers continue using them due to a lack of alternatives.

In some cases, companies attempt to upgrade the user experience, but their efforts are limited to changing visual appearances, unknowingly neglecting the fundamental issues with the user experience.

So, how can you identify the gaps in your UX? Here are some common symptoms of poor user experience: 

• Low customer acquisition and adoption
• Low customer usage and engagement
• Low customer satisfaction or poor reviews
• Low conversion rates for cross-sell or up-sell

If, at this point, you find yourself asking, what's next? Don't worry; we have got you covered.

A comprehensive UX audit is the first step in enhancing your user experience. It uncovers realistic and actionable solutions to drive user engagement.

What is a UX audit?

A UX audit includes reviewing a product's user experience (UX) to identify pain points, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement, such as usability problems, faulty links, design inconsistencies, and limitations in the user journey. 

It involves gathering insights about a product's design, information architecture, and usability using various methods, such as usability testing, user interviews, heuristic evaluation, and competitive analysis.

The ultimate goal of a UX audit is to identify insights and provide recommendations to make the digital product more usable, accessible, and aligned with user needs, ultimately leading to a better customer-centric impact. 

What are the business benefits of conducting a UX audit?

UX audits are fundamental for building user-centric digital products that deliver a positive experience and drive business success.

Conversely, poor UX complicates simple tasks like making purchases or activating subscriptions. These critical entry points can damage brand perception and increase acquisition costs due to the need for more investment to convert users.

• Improved usability and metrics: It provides evidence-based, actionable recommendations, allowing cross-functional teams to implement changes that impact usability and business metrics such as feature or platform adoption, engagement and satisfaction.
• Improved user engagement: Regular UX audits help maintain a good user experience as product design and user preferences evolve. As new features are launched, the product doesn't become unnecessarily complex.
• Streamlined user journeys: By identifying and addressing UX issues, audits help streamline the user journey, enhance product performance, and boost customer satisfaction and retention. We know that all these factors impact revenue-generating or cost-reduction efforts.

When should you do a UX audit?

Now is as good a time as any, especially if you still need to conduct a UX audit on your digital product. The audit benefits across all stages of your product's roadmap as it uncovers issues triggering user frustration.

UX audits are especially useful when preparing for a redesign or adding new functionality. Understanding the current user experience is important to determining opportunities for the future digital experience.

Other factors, such as a drop in retention, conversion rates, or continuous negative user feedback, also signal the need for a UX audit to identify possible causes.

Think of a UX audit as a health check that can be done at various stages in the design life cycle:

• Launch or redesign — launching a new product or redesigning an existing one.
• Underperformance — a product or site performance is worse than desired.
• Regular checkups and ongoing feature releases are part of regular maintenance. 

What does a UX audit Checklist look like?

Heuristic evaluation

• Assess the product's compliance with usability criteria (system status visibility, system comparison to the real world, user control and freedom, among others).
• Identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in the interface design, interactivity, and overall user experience.

Usability testing

• Conduct moderated or unmoderated usability tests of the user interface to identify possible issues and assess the system usability score (SUS).
• Observe user behavior patterns through performance analytics data (time spent on pages, heatmaps, number of sessions, clicks, etc.).

Accessibility assessment

• Evaluate the product's accessibility by checking alt-texts, screen reader integrations, keyboard commands, and compliance with accessibility standards.
• Ensure the product is inclusive and accessible to users with diverse needs, and ensure legal compliance. 

Customer journey analysis

• Examine and outline the end-to-end user experience to identify improvement opportunities.
• Analyze user interactions and pain points throughout the customer journey.

Competitive analysis

• Compare your product with competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, and differentiation opportunities.
• Analyze competitor features and user experiences to identify industry standards and guide product improvements. 

• Identify key trends and patterns in the research data.
• Prioritize solutions with personalized workshops and collaboration opportunities.
• Create a UX audit report with findings, conclusions, and actionable recommendations.

Why is it important for a third party to conduct the UX audit?

While in-house teams can conduct UX audits, involving a third party can provide several benefits:

• Unbiased perspective: External auditors bring a fresh, unbiased view to the product, which can help identify issues that internal teams may overlook.
• Specialized expertise: Third-party UX professionals have extensive experience conducting audits and can provide specialized insights and best practices.
• Objectivity: External auditors are not influenced by internal politics or agendas, ensuring the audit focuses solely on improving the user experience.

Drive user engagement with seamless UX

UX audits are crucial tools for building user-centric products that deliver a positive experience and drive business success. They can be done anytime during the product life cycle, especially if you're redesigning the product or adding a new feature.

As you reimagine your user experiences, UX experts can help you with their unbiased insights, specialized expertise and objectivity. Collaborating with third-party experts allows you to learn about industry trends and leverage their knowledge.

If you are considering user experience enhancement or UX audit, we would be happy to collaborate with your in-house team and deliver a seamless user experience.

It all starts with a conversation, let's talk!