UX Audit: How to Improve User Experience in 7 Steps
Forrester estimated that if a company invests $1 in UX design, they can expect $100 profit in return. UX design fulfills your brand objective and enhances user experience, ensuring users convert and make purchases.
However, how do you make your website user-oriented? Start with a UX audit. The user experience audits are the in-depth assessment of your digital home to improve overall website design and customer experience, ensuring users have a satisfactory time with your brand and become customers. Continue reading to learn everything you need to know about UX design audit and grow your brand.
What is UX Audit
A website UX audit is an in-depth examination to enhance your digital product design, user experience, and organic traffic. Conducting a UX audit, experts provide a UX audit report and work accordingly to improve your website performance.
For instance, if your website does not have an auto-save information option and anytime your customers fill in the information, they have to complete the lengthy process even if it takes time, UX design specialists add an auto-save information option and improve the experience.
Who Needs to Do a UX Design and Audit to Enhance Performance
B2B, B2C, eCommerce, and any other company that wants to do business online and attract customers, need to invest in professional UX design services. The reason is UX design ensures the website speaks your brand purpose, enhancing the seamless user experience and conversion rate.
So, if you have a beautiful website and not getting enough reach online, do a thorough user experience (UX ) audit to find issues like slow loading, unnecessary friction, hard-to-access information, and more. And trust me, conducting a UX audit will solve more than half of your problems because you will know where you need to work to enhance customer satisfaction.
Why You Need to Perform UX Audit
Know your website have a direct impact on your digital product sales? While good UX design drives positive customer perception, bad UX design can make customers frustrated and leave a negative perception. Here are the reasons you must invest in user experience audits to improve your website performance and achieve your goals.
- Build User-friendly Design. UX specialists research your competitors, and trends, and recommend SEO-friendly design and layout changes that align with your brand image, stand out, and drive traffic.
- Improve Website Functionality. UX audits identify usability and accessibility issues, broken links, outdated, copy, and wrong content, and others to enhance your website performance and search engine ranking.
- Enhance Customer Satisfaction. While auditing the website, UX design experts keep the target audience in mind and do thorough reviews ensuring the website is fast-loading, fully functioning, and easily navigated, enhancing customer satisfaction and conversion rate.
- Long-term Growth. User experience audit is not a one-time thing. Experts audit your website monthly and quarterly to ensure your website stays with the trend and performs smoothly.
- Stay Updated. Google updates or any action may result in creating errors and decrease ranking and traffic. UX audit helps you identify issues, stay trendy, and be consistent, ensuring users get the best experience, and converting into your customers.
7 UX Audit Steps You Need to Follow
It is time for the main course. Follow these 7 steps to Audit UX website and increase user satisfaction.
Define Your Business Objective
The first step of your website UX audit is to understand your business objective and set a goal. For example, if you think your current website is hard to go through and not user-friendly, make a plan to simplify your website design with a clean and clear layout, ensuring the design conveys your business purpose.
There’s more. If your goal is to improve sales, you need to UX audit keeping sales enhancement in mind. Do a thorough audit from the users’ perspective and improve website performance. Remember, website user experience audit varies from purpose to purpose. Understand the project objective first to bring out the best results.
Review Previous UX Audits
Go through the previous website UX audits to get a full idea of the project. Collect necessary performance analytics and user feedback to analyze user journeys on the website’s pages like impressions, clicks, average spent time on each page, scroll rates, bounce rates, and more.
For example, data shows customers are visiting a specific page but instead of scrolling down, they leave immediately, increasing the bounce rate. You can analyze these issues and fix them accordingly to ensure visitors come to your page, check it out till the end, and make an order.
Analyze the Current Data Thoroughly
The term user experience audits may seem simple, but it is complex and tricky. You need to review each page on the website, user behavior, and data to make a UX audit report and plan to improve the user interface and search engine ranking.
Go through each page and check:
- Heatmaps
- Impressions
- Click Rate
- Scroll Rate
- Users Spent Time on the pages
- Bounce Rate
- URLs
- Internal and External Links
- Content Quality
- Website SEO
- Why bounce rates are happening
- Why the pages are loading slowly and more.
Understand each data and make a note of the issues. Fix them one by one.
9 Usability Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation also known as “Rules of Thumb” is performed to evaluate the usability of a user interface. Here are the heuristic evaluation steps you need to follow to check your website’s usability:
- Aesthetic and Minimalistic Design. Is your website clear and easy to navigate? Does your website provide a clear message of what type of services you provide? To build an aesthetic and high-quality website, use appropriate colors, typography, and images that portray your brand message and highlight your products or services.
- Visibility of System Status. You need to provide clean and timely feedback to users ensuring they can understand the current state of the system. For instance, “Your order is successful, we will send you the bill within a moment”.
- Match Between System and Real World. The language and information need to be familiar and logical to the users. You need to present your content in a simple everyday language so that users can easily understand the meaning.
- Consistency and Standards. Create consistent design patterns and layouts throughout the website. Such as putting the “Menubar” at the top of the page and the “Privacy Policy” at the footer of the page because users are used to seeing menubar and privacy policy like this. So, they subconsciously look for it when they visit your website.
- User Control and Freedom. Audiences can make mistakes while filling out information or orders. So ensure users can easily undo actions and return to the previous state to redo/cancel the action. Build a clean and easy-to-navigate function.
- Error Prevention. Ensure the system guides users to fix the errors like clearly explaining what is the issue and what users can do to resolve the issues. You need to be with the users throughout the error-solving process, assuring you care about the users.
- Recognition Rather Than Recall. The system needs to provide clean and clear accessible information to ensure users do not have to remember or redo the tasks and whenever they get free time, they can come and fill in the remaining information. To give you an example, create an account for ordering your product. It may take time so ensure users can start from where they stopped the last time.
- Flexibility and Efficiency. Ensure your system is beginner-friendly so that any visitor can come and complete their necessary action easily. For instance, Photoshop is not beginner-friendly. Anyone who does not have any idea about Photoshop will get scared from looking at its toolbar. This is why Photoshop created preset tools to help the beginner and get started with the software.
- Help and Documentation. Do not forget to create help and documentation in your system to ensure if your users do not understand something or make a mistake during an action, they can easily contact you and get help as quickly as possible like creating a FAQ page or Help page.
Prioritize User Feedback
The ultimate purpose of a UX design audit is to improve user experience. So, research and identify the key issues users have complained about. You may get confused about which issue should I fix first. I have the perfect solution ready for you.
Conduct usability tests on 100 users and take their feedback. Take notes of the most repeated feedback to the least repeated feedback. Start fixing the website’s major issues. To give you an example, 85 users said your website is slow loading, you need to find the cause of the issue and ensure the website is fast loading. Then fix other minor issues users talked about.
Make a UX Audit report with Actionable Recommendations
- Your Audit Methodology. Explain why and how you completed the audit like reviewing previous UX audits, heuristics evaluation, usability testing, user reviews, and others.
- Your Findings in the Audit. Make a list of issues you need to fix immediately. For example, outdated content, broken links, slow loading, not optimized images, and others.
- The Solution. Do a detailed analysis of how you are going to solve the issues and deliver results like improved functionality, organic traffic, and conversion.
Share Your UX Audit Report with the Client and Make the Required Changes
You need to share your insights with the client and convince them to make the changes. While sharing the report, speak in a way they need these services to improve digital product performance, engagement, traffic, and sales. Like they are going to get benefitted.
For instance, you explain the problem and what happens when you solve the problem. Like, improving the website loading speed will help the visitors and Google crawlers go through the website easily, enhancing ranking, engagement, and conversion. Also, when your website works fast, users can visit your website with a weak internet connection.
When clients understand, that implementing the UX audit strategy will help them achieve their goal, they will permit you to make changes to the website. However, do not deceive the clients. Ensure any strategy you build, quality results come out of it doubling the ROI.
Wrapping Up
UX audit is a necessary step to find areas for improvement and fix the errors, ensuring building a website users love to visit and make purchases from. Thus, do not waste any more time and do a thorough user experience audit following our article.
However, if you are busy handling clients and do not have time to audit each page, Adapts Today UI/UX audit services are here for you. Our professional UI/UX experts are not only good at conducting a UX audit but also solving major to minor issues ensuring full functionality and customer satisfaction. Our main purpose is to use our expertise to help you achieve your business goals. You do not have to believe my words. Visit our website and check our portfolio. If you like it, Contact Us!
