You can feel the opportunity to differentiate your brand's online presence. But how? Visitors are finding your site and even going through the steps to put items in their cart. But they suddenly stop short at clicking purchase. Optimizing your conversion, increasing revenue, and improving engagement is literally clicks away from your reach. So what's stopping them- your user flows, too many usability errors, something else? A User Experience Audit (UX Audit) gives you an easy way to tell why your website or mobile app is underperforming. By leveraging data and applying best practice user experience and usability principles, it is possible to identify key pain points and areas of opportunity. Better yet, this heuristic-based evaluation provides you with tangible, prioritized insights and recommendations that can be smoothly transitioned into your roadmap and implementation plan.
What Does a UX Audit Do?
A UX Audit is a thorough assessment of your site's experience that provides recommendations allowing you to improve engagement, amplifying reach, and increasing sales. One of the biggest benefits of a UX Audit is that instead of waiting months or even years (and breaking the budget in the process), a UX Site Audit enables you to make small, incremental improvements that have a large impact on revenue and engagement. During the UX audit, a variety of methods and tools can be used to understand what and where things are going well (or not so good). A basic flow of a UX Audit will look something like this:
- Site Audit & Analysis: UX & Design Architects, eCommerce Marketers, and Data Analysts with deep industry and eCommerce experience audit your site. This includes diving into data and verifying the priority of usability and design issues.
- Insights & Recommendations: Insights are collected and blended with your brand’s core needs for the experience. Next, incremental design patterns are prioritized and placed into tangible recommendations. Continual impact measurement of key page flows added design patterns, customer usability is also reviewed to optimize engagement.
- Key Page & Feature Comps: In order to help implement these changes, pixel-perfect concepts of key recommendations are given to boost the development duration.
What Is Needed to Conduct a UX Site Audit
If possible, it is advisable to have an external partner carry out your UX audit. Data has shown that internal teams can find it hard to distance themselves from what they have helped in creating and subconscious prejudices will find their way into the process, making it less effective and usually taking longer. Of course, it is possible to audit your product internally by following an objective process. Here are some sources of metrics and materials helpful in an audit:
- Website and mobile analytics: Tools like Google Analytics will provide you with quantitative information. Other tools can provide heat maps and churn rates and app analytics can be collected through tools like Google Mobile Analytics or Mixpanel. It is important to go back far enough to notice trends vs. auditing on isolated data points.
- Heuristic product evaluation: This will provide qualitative data to see things from a customer’s perspective. Outline how you achieve the user goals and focus on locating where and when potential obstacles arise.
- Conversion rates: This is especially useful for eCommerce or mCommerce, but can apply in almost any scenario. Understanding when and where users are converting will give insight into the wider user experience and whether you are meeting user pain points.
- Stakeholder interviews and user surveys: Talking to the people is always important when auditing your user experience. This means interviews with internal product stakeholders and actual users. Connecting with the marketing or sales department is very helpful as they generally have a lot of customer feedback.
What Benefits Do You See With a UX Audit?
Done correctly, a UX audit will offer significant, data-driven change to an eCommerce site and see increases in both user satisfaction and ROI. Several benefits our clients have seen with our UX Site Audit include:
- Increased Conversion
- Key User Flow Optimization
- Reduced Usability Errors
- Enhanced Customer Engagement
Want to Learn More?
We believe an in-depth understanding of your target audiences, their informational needs, primary goals, online & offline tasks, and behavior is key to developing an effective business strategy, successful online tactics, and ultimately an intuitive & compelling digital experience. If you want to learn more about how a UX Site Audit could help your business contact us to start a conversation.
Additional User Experience Resources
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