What you need to know about a UX Audit
Intro
UX audit is an excellent tool used at various stages of work on a digital product. It can be applied both when planning a project, schedule or a budget, as well as at further stages of product development, including applying it to a fully functional product. In this article you will learn:
- What is a UX audit?
- What can a UX audit facilitate?
- Who conducts the audit?
- How is the audit performed?
- How to make 100% usability of the audit report?
What is a UX audit?
UX audit is a range of techniques and methods that allow to identify areas of the product that seem problematic from the user’s point of view, and thus reduce conversion and user satisfaction, as well as negatively affect the perception of the brand. Moreover, it serves as a tool to learn how the website or application is being perceived by its user. Ultimately, UX audit should provide information on improvements to be implemented in order to reach set goals, which would increase the conversion and user satisfaction in the long run.
Why is it worth using UX audit?
UX audit as a process can bring benefits only. Firstly, and most importantly, it provides an insight into how the product works and how it is perceived by its users. Such a deep product analysis enables one to discover invisible errors or difficulties that could, for instance, at some point show up at a user path. In short, a UX audit helps one build a better product and has a positive effect on its user experience.
UX audit is also an extraordinary tool that facilitates the design process planning, which can on its own be very challenging. Therefore, no matter where you are on your product development journey – with audit, we will help you make all the key decisions to succeed. If you are not convinced about what to do, how to do it, when to start or how to budget it, run a UX audit, and you will get a clear picture of next steps to follow.
Who conducts the audit?
UX audit requires specialist knowledge, skills and experience; hence, it is usually performed by the UX team. The audit allows them to identify all the strengths and weaknesses of the product, and investigate what could potentially prevent the recipients from taking an action. UX audit outcome is a report with a set of recommendations, which – if carefully implemented – will optimise the user experience. An additional advantage of having a UX expert involved in the process is that they will examine the website as users, remaining fully objective, with no emotional relationship towards the product.
How is the audit performed?
UX audit is divided into three parts:
- Product discovery
- Audit performance
- Recommendation report
As part of the “discovery” phase, we gather all the necessary information from the website owner and the entire team. We value the input on specificity of the product as well as the product target group and its needs. Taking that into consideration, we realise where our attention shall be mostly focused on and what the client’s aim of the audit is.
Sample questions to we would ask at the start:
- What made you decide on the UX audit?
- What is your goal, also a business one?
- What do we know about the product today: what works and what doesn't?
- What do we know about the product success based on analytics tools’ results, e.g. in Google Analytics?
Also, it is worth spending the time to study the target audience, which facilitates understanding user behaviour and identifying the troublesome elements of the product.
Let us elaborate on the actual process of an audit. At this stage, the expert takes the position of a target audience member and identifies all problematic issues. Many areas of the product are being analysed, from the overall product to its individual elements, for instance:
User paths
- What tasks can the user perform and what paths lead them to the goal?
- Can users complete the paths?
- Which path elements can we improve or design better?
Overall product
- As a user, do I know the purpose of the product?
- How do we adapt the product to target audience requirements/needs?
- How do we make the product visually attractive and how do we adjust the interface to match it?
Individual screens
- Are the user interface elements designed accordingly in terms of usability and visual appearance?
- Is the appropriate hierarchy of elements maintained in the project?
- Are there any items that need to be redesigned?
Conversion items
- Which of the interface elements negatively affect the conversion?
- Do we identify the areas that could be improved for a higher conversion rate?
- How do we redesign them to increase the conversion?
Recommendation report
The final stage of an audit is preparation of the report, which should be simple and easy to use. A well-prepared document is an excellent basis for making business decisions and website optimization. It must clearly pinpoint the identified errors and risk areas, as well as indicate recommended solutions to the problems. As a software boutique, we pay attention to understanding our clients’ business needs. All materials we provide are always tailored to match the business needs, budgets and schedules. We understand the complexity of working in a digital environment and we are happy to help our clients face their challenges.
There are also cases where we see multiple solutions to a given problem, and we can recommend testing individual solutions for specific product elements. In those instances additional tests or A/B tests will deliver best results.
We can also support the implementation of the recommended changes if need be. Our business model focuses both on UX works and further implementation, as well as designing ready-made user interfaces, and programming.
