How to Improve Product with UX audit

So you’ve poured your heart and soul into a great product. But what started out as an engaging piece of software with a rapidly growing user base is now hemorrhaging users with every update. People are leaving in droves, and you can’t figure out why. By the time you finally reached out to your users the answers you got to your questions were emphatic, but vague. “We hate the new version.” “It’s impossible to use.” “It’s so infuriating.” What do you need to do now?

The most simple and probably right answer – you need a UX audit. UX audit is a holistic information-gathering exercise that helps to understand how to re-design a product so as to change, either fundamentally or peripherally, a user’s experience with the product. UX audits are much more than just guessing what will work best. The only real UX design is based on analysis, and the rest is guesswork. There are many tools that can help to understand better why the users come and go and what they are doing on your website. Simply put, a UX audit allows you to make positive changes to your product based on hard data from the users.

Why Might You Need a UX audit?

Pretty much anyone who owns a website can benefit from a UX audit. It is much better to do a UX audit after conducting a UX assessment. An assessment beforehand will let you know what to focus on the most. Usually, companies that don’t have in-house UX designers stand to gain the most from a thorough UX audit. But even the companies that employ teams of designers can benefit from a third party. A fresh perspective can always bring something new to the table.

Sometimes we can’t see the problem because we are too close to it, and a fresh pair of eyes can make a world of difference. Conducting a proper audit requires a significant amount of time and money. But after the new UX design is finished and implemented, the investment will pay off. Your stagnant conversions and stale user growth will see an uptick very quickly.

How to Conduct The Audit?

Before starting, you can do in-depth testing and surveys or focus group testing. That will provide you with data so that you can understand your users and their behavior better. It will help you also to understand their worries and hesitations. You must create clearly defined user personas that will help you to understand different groups of users. Then you must adjust to their needs or goals. This can sometimes be a difficult step, but nonetheless an important one.

Various tools are used for testing and gathering data. The purpose is to identify what are the strengths and weaknesses of your website or app. What people like or enjoy and what they do not. Interviews, studies, and tests are collected by a UX audit team. They analyze them in order to identify the problems, look for patterns, and eventually to find a way to improve the weaknesses.

These are just a few of the commonly used methods:

• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods
• Interviews
• Eye Tracking
• Heat-mapping
• Scroll mapping

How to Improve Your Product with a UX Audit?

Regardless of the stage, your website or app is at – the goal of a UX audit doesn’t change. The final purposes of a UX audit are first to identify what works well and what doesn’t. And the second goal is to provide you with the necessary information about users so that you can make the right decisions about your UX.

And your UX design is not something that can wait for an upgrade. If you help your users to reach their goals simply and understandably, you will decrease the bounce rate and, ultimately, boost conversions. UX audit might be just what you need to get your business to the next level.

When is the Best Time to Audit your UX Design?

There is no exact time that is perfect for optimizing your website. Some people do it right after launch, as soon as they spot some patterns. Others don’t do it for years, and they opt for it eventually because they want to make improvements. So the right time is whenever you want to optimize.

What a UX Audit Helps you Achieve?

Users that come to your website, and interact with your services or products can become regular users or leave and never come back again. UX audits can help us to understand better why this happens. A better understanding of users’ behavior is crucial for making the right decisions and changes. The data that an UX-audit provides will show why the conversion rate is so low, why sign-ups are not regular, etc., but more importantly, it will show a way to fix all of that. Ultimately your goal is growing and boosting your profits. But you have to start with the users and their experience. Better insights allow you to make positive changes that ultimately result in better outcomes.

What to do After a UX Audit?

UX audit is not the end. Now is the time for implementation. After the planning, testing, analyzing, evaluating, after underlying all issues and problems – it is the time for action and implementing the changes based on the data that have been gathered.

Final thoughts

The exact outcome of a UX audit will depend on many factors. The depths of the problems uncovered, the nature of those problems, and the willingness of the development team to address the issues will all affect how an audit unfolds and is implemented. Their usefulness, however, is not in serious question. A long, hard look at the user’s experience with your product is an absolute necessity more often than not.

What we’re curious about is how UX audits have unfolded for you in the past. How have they affected teams you’ve worked with? Was the experience a positive one or a negative one? Please let us know in the comments. And if you know of someone who desperately needs a UX audit, feel free to share this with him, her, or anyone else you think might benefit from the information.