Understanding the value of every user, businesses invest in UX design to create as much helpful, practical, and easy-to-navigate products as possible. Yet, despite the increase in investments and CAC, customer traffic may remain persistently low, causing financial losses and overall business decline. That’s the moment to reconsider the whole approach to customer acquisition and perform the UX audit.
What is a UX audit and how to do a ux audit to maximize the company’s market performance? Let’s explore together.
What Is the UX Audit?
A well-known abbreviation UX is related to user experience, meaning the interaction between the users and the company’s services and products. Provided the experience is positive, the random customers create a network of loyal clients; otherwise, the competitors get your share of clients.
A UX audit (a UX diagnosis or UX review) is a data-driven and periodic evaluation of digital products, which aims to check the compliance of the current UX design with users’ needs and expectations. The audit targets common and industry-specific issues related to UX design:
- Outdated content
- Visual noise and design inconsistencies
- Excessive ‘clicking’
- Faulty links
- Lack of clear CTAs
- Accessibility issues
- Sales funnel roadblocks
- Positioning issues
- Data regulations, etc.
UX audits provide the business with an ‘outside perspective’ regarding the product’s performance. Based on the results, the companies reorganize their UX design approach to make it more user-oriented, and thus, increase customer involvement and ROI.
How to Perform the UX Audit?
Depending on the size of the company and available resources, the company can conduct an in-house audit or hire an audit agency for an external audit. While an in-house team may be a better idea money-wise, it is not the best idea result-wise.
In-house design teams can perform the UX audit faster than the hired agency, as they are part of the team and already have a decent understanding of product characteristics; yet, they may fail in the objective and unbiased vision of the product functionality.
The external audits are more time-consuming and costly, yet, disinterested and trustworthy. All the reports will help to uncover the UX issues, and let the companies elaborate on a more efficient product performance.
What Are the Key Points of UX Audit?
A UX design audit examines four basic characteristics of a digital product:
1. Usability heuristics
Usability heuristics is a set of 10 ‘rules of thumb’ regarding user experience.
- Real-world graphics and images.
- Simplified ‘redos’ of the actions, without losing the whole data sequence.
- Clear and consistent rules of use-product interaction.
- Consistent design, non-cluttered visual space.
- Accessible ‘help’ and ‘support’ buttons.
- Error recovery pop-ups.
- Error prevention notifications.
- System updates and upgrades visibility.
- Consistent informational load.
- Shortcuts implementation.
Provided all the rules are implemented, the users face no issues while interacting with the digital product.
2. User experience
The overall interaction with the digital product should be user-oriented and comply with all expectations of the target audience.
The UX audits provide insights regarding user traffic, navigation intuitiveness, and overall product usability. Based on the analytics data, the company should foster changes to its design strategy and improve the product’s functionality.
3. Design consistency
Ideally, every digital product is developed following the company’s design patterns and brand attributes.
The UX auditors will examine if every design component meets the branding guidelines, and thus, create its continual flow.
4. Accessibility
Accessibility of a digital product is vital, as it helps to ensure that all users, regardless of their abilities, can interact with the product successfully.
The UX auditors analyze whether all the design components are accommodated to people with special needs, checking its core characteristics:
- Empathy – the design and layout need to alleviate all the product-related concerns. The users expect a clearly structured sequence of activities and CTAs, and a successful completion of their requests.
- User research – when elaborating on the design project, it is important to consider the ‘voice of the users’, not just the vision of the business owners.
- Inclusion – UX design components need to be comprehensible by people with diverse physical and cognitive abilities.
- Navigation – UX designers are supposed to develop simple and intuitive navigation with the digital product, accompanied by well-outlined instructions and coherent informational load.
- Responsiveness – UX designers need to consider user-friendly design across all devices, to provide a top-notch experience for every user irrespective of the device.
When conducting the UX audit, the specialists analyze if the digital product meets the UX benchmarks, and thus, lets businesses improve their UX strategy.
The Final Thoughts
The digital marketplace is a highly competitive and non-stop environment, which revolves around the needs of users (customers). A well-developed UX design creates a delightful and comprehensible customer experience, and thus, allows businesses to reach, attract, and retain users.
As the user demands for comfortable interaction get higher, companies need to adjust their design strategies appropriately. The best solution is to hire a UX audit agency that will provide an objective vision of the current UX performance, and provide solutions for improvements.
