A UX audit reviews the user experience of a digital product. It helps refocus organisations, ensuring that your approach is realigned to reflect your users’ needs and your organisation’s objectives. A UX audit deeply evaluates a website or app’s performance. It covers everything from the overall design to specific features and functions. By conducting a UX audit, you can identify areas that need improvement and make changes to improve your conversion rate, bounce rate, performance, and user satisfaction. While it is helpful to conduct one UX audit, it is beneficial to conduct them quarterly for the improvement of website conversions.
What will be unpacked during a UX audit?
- The difficulties that users face when interacting with your digital product
- Challenges or pain points experienced when encountering functionalities or navigation
- Why conversions are low
- Why retention is low
- Points at which users abandon your website or app
- Key metrics
- What changes can be made to drive conversions
UX audits should be understood as a ‘health check’ for a website, carried out at various stages in the design life cycle. While it is useful to conduct a UX audit during the launch or redesign phase, during underperformance or when user challenges or pain points come to life, it is also important to conduct UX audits as regular checkups and during ongoing feature releases as part of routine maintenance.
In this sense, UX audits allow you to perceive your digital product through the eyes of the user. An insight-driven understanding of these points helps refocus attention on the areas that require more research to achieve organisational goals and user objectives and improves website conversions in turn.
UX Maturity
The first step of a UX audit is a survey that examines your organisation’s UX maturity. An awareness of your UX maturity position and how to advance to the next stage helps to ensure that the user drives design-related decision-making processes in an organisation.
As a result, user-related risks are minimised during the development phase, and resources are best utilised. Conversely, a poor understanding of UX maturity and resistance to any change may indicate that an organisation’s activities aren’t in line with user needs or wishes, which might lead to future challenges and expenditures. An intuitive, user-friendly digital product will increase overall traffic and user engagement, increasing brand visibility. Strong UX design concepts are crucial for businesses because they foster long-lasting relationships with users and increase retention rates. Therefore, knowing your present UX maturity level can improve user ease and increase conversion rates.
Conducting a UX audit regularly is beneficial because it allows you to identify where your organisation sits in the context of UX maturity and thus promotes its growth. Regular identification of where your company stands in areas such as UX capabilities, the existence of UX goals, how UX is understood across leadership teams, and the existence of UX strategy and processes might inspire and motivate your organisation to make UX-related improvements and improve website conversions.
A user-centric focus
UX audits are intended to highlight particular product features or functionalities that might be problematic for users or that are underperforming. If improvements are made based on recommendations, there is room for growth and progress in these areas. As a result, website traffic is likely to grow by at least 10% with a decreased drop-off rate. User loyalty will increase as a result of a more seamless user experience, and conversion rates will rise.
User observations are a key step included in the UX audit to understand exactly how a digital product is being used so that we can get to the heart of user needs and pain points. Regularly conducting user observations of a digital product as part of a UX audit means that the recommendations informed by these observations have the users’ core wants and needs at the forefront of future design decisions. In turn, this is likely to increase website conversions.
To conclude
UX audits are an excellent way to uncover potential existing pain points or identify where and why users are experiencing challenges while using a digital product. However, we advise that quarterly UX audits are conducted to ensure that key metrics are monitored consistently, your organisation is constantly striving to reach a higher level of UX maturity, and the user is always at the forefront of design decisions. Consequently, this will improve website conversions.
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