UX Audit: Proven way to improve your digital product

What's important, and I'd like to pay attention to, is how digital products are created. Very often, if not always, it's impossible to do everything according to the process and good practices - and it's completely normal. Especially since we want to create things as fast as possible.

So, imagine there's your product. You're pouring resources and money into development and marketing, but the conversion rates are not so good, and user engagement... is not better.

Here it's good to make a stop, double check everything, and audit it to look at your product from a big picture perspective. That's where UX Audit comes into play.

What is the UX Audit

Practically speaking, it's a thorough examination of your digital product from different perspectives. And there are many, many things like: usability, UI, UX, user journey, accessibility, heuristic evaluation, competitive analysis, analytics review, journey mapping and other fancy names.

Thing is, they are only tools that aim to help you uncover how you could optimize your product.

Reasons to do UX Audit

At first, let's focus on why would you even think about doing that audit. There can be many different reasons, but generally speaking we are able to categorize them:

Not so good conversion rate

There are conversions in your product, but basically, they have plateaued or are even declining. This may be the sign that users don't find your product intuitive or valuable enough to stay and explore.

We can analyze different metrics here like CTR, bounce rate, low engagement, low time spent and so on.

Negative user feedback

It's painful to see your users hate your app, but on the other hand they treat your product so valuable they decided to leave a negative review for it. It can mean that your product is important to them so much, that they want to fight for it.

Inconsistency

Sometimes your product is growing so fast and so many things are happening that it's impossible to control everything, and that's natural. But sometimes comes the time when you need to check your digital product for inconsistencies in many ways:

• Visual Design
• Content (writing)
• User flows
• Making actions
• Tone of voice
• Behavior

The UX Audit process

First and the most important thing is that the process should be adjusted to the product and budget. There is no one master process and it should always be adjusted. There is no reason to blindly follow the rules because it's wasting the money.

However, we can specify some general stages that are almost always present:

Goal setting and data gathering

Yes, start with why, define clearly what you want to achieve by the audit. Gather data about your users, gather current business problems.

This element is fundamental - when you do something you need to clearly know why you're doing this and what should be the results.

Heuristic evaluation

We can treat them as rules we should inspect the digital product with. It's about consistency, error prevention, user friendliness and many different things. The rules defined for example by Jakob Nielsen are a good starting point to inspect your product.

User testing

It's a very valuable tool because you gather feedback directly from the users and they are... real users. You're biased and subjective in terms of rating your products, but users are the final bosses and in the end of the day they matter.

It can go that way:

• You select particular people to test with
• You prepare scenarios / tasks to complete in your app
• Users think aloud while completing the tasks
• You document everything and try to get insights and repetitive patterns from that

Aside from that you can ask real-time questions, record users completing the tasks and so on - possibilities are endless.

Analysis and prioritization

Ok, right now we've gathered the insights, we know what should be done to make the product better. The key thing right now is to prioritize the ideas of improvement. We could use the Impact / Effort framework where at first we recommend to implement the most impactful ideas requiring least effort.

UX Audit Deliverables

Let's gather things up, after conducting a UX Audit you will usually get these deliverables:

• Step by step analysis of your products
• Key findings and theses
• Actionable recommendations set up in prioritized way

Questions and answers

How long does a UX Audit take?

Usually UX audit takes between 2-4 weeks, but as everything it depends on the size of the project, complexity, scope and so on.

What kind of involvement is needed from me?

We'll need access to your product's analytics data and user feedback. Also, we can ask questions to better understand the business goals and audience. But don't worry, we make it as seamless as possible and your input is crucial.

What's the cost of UX Audit?

It varies widely, but can range from $4,000 to $25,000 or more.

Are you interested? Make the first step!

Just contact us. The first step is a quick consultation about your needs for a user experience audit service. Then, we'll work closely through the process we described above.