A Detailed Guide About UX Audit, its Benefits, and Process

Is your website or app bringing the desired conversions? Are you stuck with poor-performing UI UX design?

If yes, this article is for you.

The primary purpose of a business is to generate sales. However, it isn’t easy. Your business’s products or services must appeal to users. A perfect design with consistency and functionality is significant. Hence, cusotmers will convert. Bad quality UI design can badly affect conversions. Also, it hampers customer trust.

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In this regard, a UX audit can help you. It will identify the core problems within your website design. Furthermore, it will submit a list of improvements. Thus, you will attain business growth. Most importantly, your UX audit must be top-notch.

Read this article till the end. You will understand:

What is a UX audit?

It is also referred to as a User Experience audit. UX audit is detailed research and analysis of a business’s product or service. It finds the usability problems and recommends effective solutions for business growth.

Additionally, it is a crucial UX process to identify loopholes in the UX UI design.

It unveils minor and major design problems. Without a user-friendly design, businesses can lose a massive sum of money and time. Therefore, it is essential for both start-ups and established companies.

Benefits of a UX audit:

UX audit has great importance in the current market. Companies aim to create an excellent user experience. Therefore, your business must run regular UX audits to analyze the pitfall in your product strategy.

Here are some of the benefits of conducting a UX audit:

Identify the weaknesses and strengths of a product or service design
Analyze a product or service to fulfill business goals
Suggest improvements in a current product design
Help achieve user and business goals.
Application of UX audit increases conversions
Improve user experience by recommending an actionable strategy
Formulate a successful design strategy

For example:

A UX audit may reveal that a website has limited payment options. Thus, your company can employ multiple payment streams to facilitate users.
A product page lacks detailed product information. It has affected the conversion rate. In response, you can improve the product description.

Difference between UX audit and Usability testing:

If metrics aren’t available to conduct a UX audit, you can go for usability testing. However, usability testing must be combined with the business goals and Industry standards for the final results. In this way, a final UX audit can be conducted.

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When should you conduct a UX audit be conducted?

Generally, you can conduct a UX audit when it is required. A UX audit is mandatory if you notice declined conversions or user experience. However, a UX audit can be conducted in these three scenarios.

In the early stages of product or service after release.

Hence, the audit team will have enough data to examine the performance. Without any user data, you can’t conduct a UX audit.

Periodic UX audits to meet business and user requirements.

It will help you constantly improve your product design according to user experience.

Before a product update or redesign.

UX audit can also be conducted before the development stage for improved functionality and an updated design.

What is the price of a UX audit?

UX audit provides massive benefits to companies without a UX team. On the contrary, in-house UX teams constantly examine the product or service data. Therefore, they may be less likely to conduct a UX audit.

In connection, you can hire an external audit team. You must check your budget before hiring. An external team helps in a transparent analysis. On the other hand, the in-house team may hardly analyze the product from new angles. The product prejudice may hinder the analysis process. And you will not get the actual results.

So, if you have decided to hire an external audit team, three offers are available:

According to Nate Sonnenberg, a one-person team can cost up to $1000 for a few days’ audit.
A full-strength audit team may charge $10000 for a 4 week UX audit process. You will get in-depth product analysis and business insights. In 2-3 weeks, they will bring 80% of the result. These results will be enough to start the improvement process.
You can hire a professional UX auditor for a customized UX audit with deep insights. He may charge $7500.

However, if the budget is tight, you can follow a strategic process for a UX Audit. In-house UX team will perform the task for you. Additionally, you can hire a professional freelancer on Upwork, PeoplePerHour, or LinkedIn. He/She may cost $1500 for a 2-3 day audit with a short design checklist.

Note: These UX audit prices are average. The actual UX audit price depends upon the type of work and complexity. Therefore, you must explain the requirements to the UX audit team or individuals for a fixed price.

What do you need to prepare for a UX audit?

For an in-house UX audit, plan a team of developers, product designers, and business analysts. All team members must have solid interaction with the users. Assign them with due responsibilities. Furthermore, appoint a decision-maker. He will verify the process and finalize the end results.

For UX audit process, formulate guidelines. Without any guidelines and strategy, you won’t get the desired results. This desired result may be product performance and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

In connection, if you are hiring a UX agency or individual, you can sit and discuss the whole project with the team or individual.

Anyway, to prepare a UX audit, you will need:

Identify UX audit goals {conversion, Return on Investment (ROT)}

Conversion is the most prominent goal.

Time limit for completion

According to Parkinson’s law, work extends according to the time set for it. Therefore, set a reasonable timeline and divide it into milestones.

Resources for the UX audit deliverables
Stakeholders must know the capacity of the UX audit and its exceptions.

Here is a detailed explanation of the UX audit process.

Summary of the UX audit process:

Your audit team needs to summarize the use of different tools and statistics to analyze the performance of a product or service. An overview of these UX UI strategies will help in the later UX site audit.

Analysis of the business and customer goals	Inconsistent fonts, layout, and color	Broken links
Competitor analysis	Wireframes and Prototypes	User flows
User research	Traffic and conversion metrics	Accessibility
Sitemaps	Usability issues	Outdated content
Legal issues of GDPR, CCPA

Statistics and resources collection:

It is another vital UX audit preparation strategy. Clear goals will help gather the correct information. Therefore, collect relevant and significant statistics and information for the actual website or app audit process. You can discuss the main metrics with an in-house audit team.

Important channels for data collection:

There are three important data collection channels. They are:

Business analysis (Interviews with stakeholders, analyze product requirements)

User analysis (User personas, user flows)

Competitive analysis

Business analysis:

Identify the company’s objectives and requirements clearly. What are your expectations from the product? Analyze them and base your UX audit accordingly. In-house interviews with designers, product managers, developers, sales managers, and business owners will help you in this regard.

Furthermore, the UX audit team should conduct surveys about product goals, problems, and solutions. Also, arrange one-to-one interviews with the company’s stakeholders for detailed insights.

Analysis of the product requirements will also pave the data collection.

User analysis:

User analysis is important to identify target customers. Analysis of the current users will identify whether your current users are the target audience or not. Interviews with potential customers should be conducted if a product is unavailable. In interviews, UX auditors will ask about their needs.

Most importantly, User experience auditors must conduct usability testing to unveil any false from interviews and surveys. The information gathered will be put into user personas, and user flows.

User personas:

User personas depict customers’ demography, behavior, problems, and expectations. UX auditors organize user personas for different types of customers based on interviews and surveys.

User flows:

User flows are drawn based on the user requirements and flexibility.

Competitive analysis:

Apart from user research, competitive analysis is an essential statistical process. It helps in a better understanding of user expectations. Analyzing competitors’ traffic, conversions, product usability, SEO ranking, etc., will help your UX audit team to build a better user experience.

Furthermore, ask your audit team to gather ideas for similar products and user experiences. Hence it is a significant competitive UX audit.

Product evaluation:

Product evaluation aims to have a thorough analysis of the product.

It helps in achieving users’ goals.
Identify the product obstacles that affect user experience.

Note: Existing knowledge of the product may hinder the evaluation process. It is due to the subconscious awareness of it. External UX audit team can help in this regard. Moreover, your audit team needs to look through the product from new angles. In addition, Nielsen’s heuristics help stay focused on product evaluation.

Product or service analytics:

Product evaluation provides qualitative analysis. In connection, analytics provides quantitative analysis of the product and user experience. Different analytics tools can help gather quantitative data.

UX audit tools:

Google Analytics:

It provides data like trends, traffic, user flow, advanced features, conversions and bounce back rates, and On-Page time.

Kissmetrics:

Kissmetrics have powerful analytical features for web and mobile app audit preparation.

Crazy Egg:

Crazy Egg provides different analytical filters that help understand users’ different scenarios.

Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg also provide some features like heatmaps and churn rate. Heatmaps are crucial as they define how users interact with the interface. They diagnose scrolls, clicks, and cursor movement. In this way, your audit team can understand users’ activity on the web page.

QuickTime:

It records the live experience of a UX audit. Hence, every step is visually recorded.

App analytics:

Google mobile analytics and Mixpanel are the best tools for mobile app analytics. Mixpanel captures moments, clicks, and experiences of the mobile users.

Hotjar:

Hotjar is a beginner tool with no customization. It is easy to use.

Results of Previous UX audit report:

UX auditors can examine the previous UX audit reports to determine whether the problem still exists or not.

What were the improvements?

Were the solutions helpful for users?

Organize the collected data of the initial UX audit process:

Finally, your audit team will organize the gathered data. Spreadsheets or worksheets are important in this regard. After the arrangement, you can upload the spreadsheets to a cloud service.

If your team doesn’t have the proper structure, you can try UserFocus and Usability.gov to get templates for organizing metrics.

Trends and tendencies:

Trends and tendencies are crucial for user experience. Identify trends and tendencies via data mining, card sorting, and insight incubation.

How to Conduct a UX audit?

There isn’t any official method to conduct a website or UX audit. UX agencies and independent UX auditors have their own specialized techniques. However, general principles and goals are often similar among them.

After following the above preparation steps, website or app auditors will follow the four elements for conducting UX Audit.

Usability heuristics
User experience
Design System
Accessibility
UX audit checklist
UX audit report
UX audit recommendations

Usability heuristics:

It is a crucial usability audit. It includes both website usability and app usability audit. For a heuristics audit, you can apply Jakob Nielsen’s formula. His 10 points formula is the basis for almost every UX audit. He introduced it in the early 1990s. It is a flexible formula of general strategies that fit every UX Audit.

Visibility of system status:

Your customers must understand your current system of website or app. They shouldn’t find any difficulties in usability and interactions. Therefore, strategize and ask your UX audit team to create fluent user flows.

Match between the system and real world:

Your product design needs to deliver a compatible experience. It must be compatible with users’ language and concepts. Furthermore, it should feel logical, authentic, and instant.

User control and freedom:

Product design must support user control. Therefore, users should have complete freedom of control over design. They can exist a task with a change in mind.

For example:

Deleting a product or service from a cart
Back button
Money-back-guarantee

Consistency and standards:

Consistency is important to avoid poor performance. Inconsistent design triggers cognitive thinking, which disturbs smooth user interaction with the product or service. Additionally, a design must comply with industry standards.

Error prevention:

Error-free design is essential for brand awareness and excellent user experience.

Recognition vs. recall:

The User Interface’s elements, buttons, and actions need to be self-explanatory. They should give clear instructions. Hence, your design team should emphasize recognition and minimize users’ cognitive loading.

Flexibility and efficiency of use :

Design needs to be flexible and efficient in use. Thus, it should customize user flow.

Aesthetic and minimalist design:

Your product or service design should not be overburdened with useless elements and content. Keep it artistic yet simple. In this way, users can complete their tasks effortlessly.

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from problems:

Avoiding random and irritating messages in error links and codes strengthens the user experience. Instead, direct them to customer support or product catalog.

Help and product documentation:

Ask the design and content team to include product features and benefits in the product documentation. Furthermore, understand users’ desired tasks for customized products.

User experience:

It is the most crucial part of a usability UX Audit. UX auditors analyze the interaction data and analytics. Thus, it helps determine user experience. Auditors may also conduct usability testing. It will help to identify the problems in the design. All of these steps contribute to a user experience audit.

Design system:

Evaluation of the design system is also a crucial portion of a UX audit process. Different color patterns, UI components, and elements should be according to user experience. This design system audit is essential for a perfect design and brand awareness.

Accessibility:

Accessibility audit means analyzing the design accessibility. It aims to make usable designs for all types of users. An accessible design will be usable for visually impaired and diseased ones along with normal individuals. Users will have different customized options for an excellent user experience. Light and dark themes, font, and color adjustment are all included in the accessibility audit check.

Tip:

Google’s Lighthouse can identify the accessibility problems in your design. It also shows the industry standards. Hence, you can utilize it during an accessibility audit.

UX audit checklist:

UX audit checklist is like revising a paper in an exam. It helps in the final preparation before the UX audit report. UX audit team can scan all the audit processes at once. Thus, they can improve all the mistakes for a better user experience. Check out the UX audit checklist.

UX audit report:

A UX audit report contains findings of the complete analysis. It is laborious and time investing work. Therefore, a UX audit report must be actionable. Otherwise, it won’t bring results.

Overall, it tells the following details.

What are the flaws of a product or service?

What are the improvements?

How was the user experience?

What are the missing links?

How do users respond to the UI design?

Is there any hierarchical defect?

All the findings are compiled in a UX audit report. There is no one-size-fits-all formula. UX audit reports are different based on the information and business goals.

It includes the following three key strategies:

Project summary:

It includes answers to these questions.

What are business goals?

Is the product or service user-centered?

What are the expectations?

Are there any user obstacles?

What are the main goals of the UX audit?

Methodology:

In methodology, an audit report contains qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Results:

Results revolve around these questions:

Is there any usability or navigation issue?

Is design user-oriented usability?

What are the pain points and results?

UX audit Samples:

Check out these UX audit samples for a better understanding.

UX audit recommendations:

UX audit recommendations are the crux of the whole UX audit process. They include improvements for the product or service. Most importantly, all the recommendations are with supporting evidence and data. All of them must be clearly interpreted to clear any confusion.

These recommendations should be:

Effective

Actionable

Including examples

Specific

Visual Design:

UI designers and their team can analyze the UX audit report and act accordingly. Hence, the improvements will boost the usability and consistency of the design. It includes logo, font, color, texture, and layout betterment to the next level.

Responsive Design:

Slow websites badly affect traffic and conversions. Therefore, a UX audit must also cover the website or app responsiveness. The final results will then be incorporated. It must be ensured that the website and app effectively run on old and new mobiles and laptops.

Perfect brand awareness:

Recommendations of the UX audit report are of great significance. They help establish brand awareness via applying consistent tone, style, and voice. Perfect format of headings, sub-headings, and text should be noted. Additionally, content must be compatible with the design.

Successful application of UX audit report:

Clear and easy user flow
Customer-oriented CTAs, design, content
Better marketing strategies
Convince users for a specific task (support, contact us, sign in)

You will have grasped the whole concept of the UX audit process. UX audits are an essential part of a business. You should conduct regular UX audits for your business products and services. Because these drastically increase sales after a proper application.

If you are looking for an experienced UX audit agency, you can contact us for a detailed conversation about your business audit.