What is User Experience Audit and How it Help to Increase Website or App Conversions

Illustration: User Experience Audit

Table of Contents

What is a UX Audit?

It's easy to get caught up in the aesthetics when redesigning a digital product. However, it should be designed to increase customer engagement and satisfaction, as well as user experience. People tend to return to trusted websites and apps where their needs and comfort have been considered. Researches show that 88% of online consumers are less inclined to visit a website again after a negative experience, and 90% of users said they stopped using an app due to its poor performance [2]. Therefore, user-centered design is required to gain customers’ trust and loyalty.

A UX audit (also known as a UX review or usability audit) helps improve the quality of your digital product by analyzing its strengths and weaknesses and allows you to identify business value opportunities and how to increase your product’s conversion rates.

A usability audit is based on established heuristics and/or prior user research that can find answers to some essential questions that address the product users’ objections. Where do users experience difficulties comprehending functionality or navigation? What can be learned about user behavior and needs from the collected data? What aspects of a website or app might be modified to boost its commercial performance?

During a UX audit, auditors measure, test, and analyze broken links, design system inconsistencies, layout and hierarchy inconsistencies, outdated content, customer journey bottlenecks and roadblocks, usability and accessibility, usability heuristics, branding, and messaging. Also, they review product design against business and user experience goals, traffic, engagement, conversion rates, retention, and sales analytics and check legal compliance (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) that refers to particular UI elements.

Additionally, UX review helps form hypotheses regarding the causes of users' actions on the website or app as well as their potential future behavior. According to the surveys [3], one of the major challenges customers face when interacting with brands on mobile is “not being able to find the information they need.” Simple navigation and site search save users time, allowing them to filter by what they’re looking for.

Another important factor is the ease of achieving the user’s goal. An overloaded design distracts users and hinders their journey, leading to negative consequences. For example, according to Google research, 46% of people say they would not purchase from a brand again if they had a fragmented experience using the mobile version of the website or app [3].

Who Conducts a UX Audit?

The size of the company and available resources usually influence the choice of who conducts a UX audit. Large companies commonly hire a UX design agency, which can be costly but results in careful audits with meaningful feedback and insights. Smaller businesses might consider hiring a freelancer to get comparable results when startups will almost certainly use an in-house design team to conduct UX audits. However, it is recommended to have an external audit team ​​because internal teams might find it difficult to maintain objectivity and unconscious biases will interfere with the investigation.

A professional UX audit team should include strategists, designers, and developers. Amazing things happen when different experts meet in the same room. Also, a company decision-maker has to be involved in the UX review process to let them see friction points at all levels and validate ideas.

A UX audit is a structured evaluation of a digital product to identify usability issues, enhance user satisfaction, and improve conversions. It involves multiple specialists:

A UX audit is a collaborative effort that blends research, design, technical insights, and business strategy to create a more user-friendly experience.

When to Conduct a UX Design Audit?

Usually, experts suggest conducting a UX audit when a website or an application has been live for some time. Although a digital product may have satisfied business objectives when it was first launched, it may occasionally become the case that it no longer does so, as business and digital trends change.

You should consider a UX audit if you notice that your customers don’t convert when using your product and your revenue is falling below expectations. It's often difficult to pinpoint the reasons for the issues, which is why a UX audit is necessary. Companies may also schedule regular UX audits to ensure their digital product meets business and user experience objectives.

What are the Stages of a UX Audit?

A professional UX audit typically consists of several stages that reveal actionable improvement areas in the context of the business goals. However, depending on time and budget boundaries, each of these tasks can be scaled up or down.

1: Data Gathering

At this stage, the audit team collects essential information about the business goals associated with the website or application. The audit team conducts interviews with stakeholders, as well as user interviews and surveys to determine exactly what data will be required to make the audit as effective as possible. This helps gather a variety of insights and create relevant user personas that are necessary for performing the UX audit.

2: Competitor Analysis

Understanding competitors will also help the audit team gain insight into the options of other users. It will be useful to recognize the similarities and differences between each product by examining competitors to define your business value proposition and unique selling points (USPs) that can be used to showcase your strengths over your competitors' weaknesses.

The audit team will do a SWOT analysis of a competitor's digital product to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. An example of a strength could be that the competitor's website is easier to navigate than yours. A weakness could be that their website has slower page loading times.

Essentially, a competitive audit enables you to discover what opportunities your business could be overlooking and what strategies are effective for other businesses in your market, allowing you to adopt those tactics into your strategy. Also, you can take into account the software and solutions they are using to automate their processes. This can help you discover new approaches to manage your website or app more efficiently and make it more accessible for customers.

3: Analytics Review

It's statistically proven if a website is not mobile-friendly, mobile users are five times [2] more likely to abandon a task. And if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of visitors leave it [2]. The most important aspect of working with analytics is to collect enough data to identify trends rather than single points.

Analytics tools are useful in terms of providing quantitative data. Many companies use Google Analytics or Similarweb to obtain information about traffic sources, traffic flows, and trends over time. Additionally, we can track user flows, hotspots for conversion and abandonment, and what people do after visiting your website.

Such useful services as heat maps and churn rates like Crazy Egg or Kissmetrics provide valuable quantitative information about how visitors behave on your website. For apps, analytics can be gathered by Google Analytics or Mixpanel.

If it's an eCommerce project, conversion rates and sales figures can help determine whether the digital product or its content addresses user pain points. Google Analytics has provided proven results and benefits to numerous industry-leading brands. AccuWeather, for example, was able to acquire a complete picture of its online and offline campaign efficacy and gather insights into its mobile audience's behavior, while Nissan gained a better understanding of its target audience's product preferences — all with the help of Google Analytics results.

4: SEO & Lead Conversion Optimization Audits

An examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) helps determine whether the website is optimized to achieve the traffic goals and get a sense of how you can improve it to achieve these goals. Lead conversion optimization is required to analyze how and where traffic is coming to a website. SEO optimization includes links but also extends to other aspects such as keyword usage, content, metadata, page speed, user journey, and video optimization.

Graph data source: Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate [4]

SEO and lead conversion optimization audits are closely related to the Analytical Review and can be carried out concurrently. It's important to evaluate your website's content as part of the SEO audit to see if it is informative, useful, and up-to-date — SERPs ranking and conversions may suffer from outdated or irrelevant content. With this information, you may better understand your customers' behavior and optimize your product's content to meet their demands by understanding the sources of your traffic. When compared to digital advertising, SEO improvements can lower customer acquisition costs by 87.41% on average [5].

5: Social Media Audit

A social media audit should be done if your social media presence isn't driving more visitors to your website. The UX audit team will review all of your company's social media accounts to determine if they're all consistent with the company's branding by having the same images, logo, tone of voice, etc. Then, the performance of each page must be reviewed, including which type of content performs the best and worst.

Social media audit results take the guesswork out of marketing and help you identify and track the metrics that allow you to measure ROI. This information is used to better understand your audience and optimize your social media to engage them. Moreover, it helps to refresh your social media strategy to further interest your audience and attract them to your website.

6: Usability Heuristic Evaluation

When developing a website or app, it is obvious to put oneself in the user's shoes and try to achieve their goals. In order to distance themselves from the product, UX audit teams employ heuristic principles developed by specialists.

A number of established usability heuristics are used to make a digital product work for users. The most popular Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design form the basis for many UX design audits. They are called "heuristics" because they are general rules of thumb rather than specific usability guidelines. Simply said, usability heuristic evaluation lets experts define what possible obstacles users can face in reaching their goals. For example, the system should respond to any changes or activities by giving the user an indication that everything is fine when they complete an action on the website and helping them understand what to do next.

Other, well-known heuristic evaluations are Gerhardt-Powals’ cognitive engineering principles and Weinschenk and Barker's classification [6]. But it is not recommended to rely entirely on popular sets of heuristics. Instead, the audit team should always aim to tailor the set for your product because it will result in more effective testing and better outcomes.

The heuristic evaluation is important in the early stages of the design process. It helps the team to identify areas where users are likely to encounter usability issues and prioritize design work to improve usability. The cost of fixing the usability problems discovered during the evaluation will be substantially cheaper than if the issues were found after development is complete.

7: User Flows & User Journey Audits

User flows and user journeys are powerful tools for understanding the key paths that users take during their product user journey. User flows depict how users navigate through different screens and features on an app or website to accomplish a goal. A user journey, on the other hand, delves deeper into the psychology of the journey by focusing on the user's pain points, feelings, and expectations, resulting in a more holistic depiction of how an app or website is used throughout the session. User journeys are used to create a picture of the UX, which helps to make clearer design decisions by emphasizing human usability.

The audit team will divide a user's experience into three parts after thoroughly understanding their flows: entry, steps, and exit. The entry refers to the user's first encounter with the product. Websites typically have many entry points, whereas apps must be downloaded from an app store. The steps refer to the user's desired sequence of actions following their entry. Typically, this is linked to an onboarding goal that determines when the user achieves and thus comprehends the value proposition. The exit refers to the last interaction with the product and is usually associated with the expected action from the user. For example, the user could have registered, filled out a contact form, or purchased a product.

Optimizing user flow is a multi-step process that requires numerous strategies and changes along the way. Visitors can navigate your website in mysterious ways, so if you truly want to assist them in reaching their goals, you must rely on cold, hard data.

8: Design System Evaluation

User satisfaction is a key component of usability. While functionality and simplicity of use are crucial, a product should also be visually appealing and enjoyable to use. For continuity and consistency to be maintained, a company's design system is essential. To make those UI elements and design patterns adhere to branding standards and user experience objectives, auditors have to look into the product's design system.

Such evaluation will help understand if your app has UI design inefficiencies, such as a return button that hides beneath a drop-down menu, making navigation difficult; or if users rage-click on a non-interactive button or element that appears to be interactive but isn’t.

A proper design system audit will assess your digital product and designs from different perspectives, including UI component continuity and adherence to the product's style guide and how it aligns with legal compliance (GDPR, CCPA, etc.).

9: Accessibility Checking

Placing great importance on inclusivity is more than just a trend, as there are millions of people who live with some type of disability. That's why a digital product must be accessible to be inclusive for all its users.

Making your web and mobile applications useable for as many users as possible involves the process of accessibility testing. It makes websites and apps accessible to people with disabilities, such as vision impairment, hearing loss, and other physical or cognitive conditions which affect the 1.6 billion people worldwide and control 18.3 trillion dollars in spending of consumers [7].

Companies are now legally required to make their websites more accessible. They should use technologies such as Google’s Lighthouse, which helps identify issues that may violate web accessibility standards.

The auditors will assess if the product's color palette, fonts, and components serve users with visual impairments. They will also consider whether the website or app allows users to switch between light and dark modes to accommodate users with sensitive eyesight. These audit results will help designers follow best practices so that the digital product meets WCAG standards before the design handoff.

10: Reporting of Findings

At this stage, after completing a design audit, auditors form a UX audit report with practical recommendations for resolving any issues or optimizing the product. Furthermore, the report includes actionable solutions to the most serious UX issues discovered during the UX Audit. It also includes redesigned customer journeys and purchase paths for the pages with the most ineffective customer journeys. The report is built according to the user needs identified during the audit. All of this contributes to increased conversions after the recommendations are implemented.

How Business Can Prepare for a UX Design Audit

Company leaders should have a clear awareness of their existing and target customers as well as distinct business objectives, before starting a UX audit. Ideally, a company should confirm that they have a few important elements in place. This checklist will help a company get ready for a UX audit.

Define Your Business Goals

Business owners must unquestionably have a major goal that corresponds to their company specifics. It will help define expectations for the results. Revenue targets, conversion goals, and any other objectives that are important to business should also be useful for the UX audit to be done properly.

Set a Due Date

A time limit is important because theoretically auditing can last forever. As a business owner, you should make sure you have a well-constructed timeline to keep everything on track. It’s also beneficial to have both an overall timeline with milestones set for specific dates and individual timelines with tasks and clear ownership.

Establish Budget

A budget is especially important if the audit is to be performed by a third party. The expected cost will vary depending on how detailed you want to go. In any case, prioritize the team of UX professionals if you want a custom audit that aligns with your goals and delivers extremely actionable insights pointing to the problems that you should address.

What are the Benefits of Having a UX Audit for Websites or Apps?

Most importantly, a usability audit can significantly enhance digital product performance, which might open up new business opportunities. Even though a usability audit isn't a miraculous fix-all instrument for every product problem, it results in a list of benefits.

The following strategies are an excellent place to start if you want to strategically boost your conversion rates. However, a follow-up is essential. Nothing will change if you do not implement the suggested improvements.

You should also consider that some of these are likely to drive better results for your business than others. The important thing is to define your goals, gather information, and conduct ongoing objective testing to determine what resonates with your target audience.

Case Study: eCommerce Website UX Audit

The ability to focus on a customer, hear them, and most importantly, consider their wishes makes a company customer-oriented. To get a competitive edge over others that take no action, businesses always strive to improve their products.

Recently we completed a UX audit of the eCommerce website that has been on the market for many years. Our task was to conduct an in-depth analysis of the company's statistical data, study the best practices, and incorporate them into the project. This case includes the part of the audit that clearly demonstrated how user maps work, design system research, and conclusions based on its data.

Task

The online computer equipment store was created over 10 years ago and did not correspond to modern eCommerce best practices. It was decided to conduct a thorough UX audit to redesign the online store interface to provide customers with a relevant interaction experience.

Challenge

The project's goal was to boost conversion at each stage of the purchase, strengthen customer loyalty, increase the average check size, and improve the repeated purchase rate.

How We Helped

As a solution, our UX audit team performed a usability audit and collected data that enabled us to assess the existing situation and prepare recommendations for further improvements to the eCommerce website.

Process

Research & Data Analysis

Because the company has been on the market for many years, we had access to a large amount of data, such as user paths, entry and exit points, conversion rates, demographic data, page loading speed, browsers, operating systems, screen resolution, user interests data, behavioral indicators, and much more. As a result, we analyzed user behaviors, found flaws, studied the world's best practices, and developed an action plan to address them.

Usability Heuristic Evaluation

In the beginning, we could only guess what the website visitors wanted to see or find, but the previously collected data helped our team do the usability heuristic evaluation to find areas where users likely faced usability problems, especially the ones that had a direct impact on user conversion rate. So, we managed to prioritize design efforts to improve it.

User Flows Audit

At this stage, the project's architecture was determined, and user flows were specified and optimized. We managed to identify the main trends and develop recommendations for further improvement of the successful user experience.

UI Design Audit & Guidelines

We studied and analyzed more than 200-page layouts for desktop, tablet, and mobile. Our design recommendations were based on the Atomic Design Methodology through the design system. In addition, our team created a guideline and onboarding comments to assist developers in simplifying the process.

Results

Let's go over all of the promotion and usability improvement results that the online store obtained based on our UX audits recommendations. These are the primary findings we reached after studying the statistics of the website's several pages after a year after design improvements were implemented.

Article Conclusion

A UX audit is not just a design review; it is a strategic tool that directly impacts business outcomes. Clear navigation, fast-loading pages, effective CTAs, and optimized user flows determine whether a visitor converts into a customer. A deep analysis of user behavior and UX metrics allows not only the identification of problem areas but also the development of a systematic approach to addressing them.

Companies that invest in regular UX audits benefit from higher conversion rates, improved customer loyalty, reduced acquisition costs, and increased customer lifetime value (LTV). A well-executed audit, followed by the implementation of UX improvements, helps businesses scale and achieve sustainable growth.

References

Authors

Volodymyr Dziuman

Volodymyr Dziuman

UX / UI Designer | Researcher

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Eugenia Vyshnytska

Eugenia Vyshnytska

UX Writer | Content Designer

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