A lot of effort goes into making an efficient product, be it a SaaS platform, an enterprise tool, or an e-commerce site. Sometimes, even after thoroughly researching and incorporating your innovative points to attract users, the product’s engagement suddenly declines, leaving you in a state of confusion. It is as if your customers have lost interest in your product. You notice a sudden decline in engagement and underutilization of features, leaving you perplexed, even though everything appears to be in order. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
If you ever find yourself in the above scenario, then it’s high time for a more in-depth analysis of the situation. The best way to troubleshoot this situation is starting from a UX point of view. This is where a UX audit comes in.
What is a UX audit?
To understand the concept better, let us compare the UX audit to a routine health checkup that helps you unearth underlying issues in a product that would have gone unnoticed earlier. This health check includes a detailed evaluation of the project from a UX perspective. By doing so, you will be able to pinpoint all those areas of your app that require mending to attain perfection.
Conducting a UX design audit sheds light on the reasons behind deteriorating user engagement and a hike in user churn. Instead of implementing a few “quick fixes,” an audit will assist you in identifying the underlying cause of the errors and devising a long-term solution. Additionally, you can assess the product’s responsiveness across various platforms.
However, keep in mind that an audit cannot resolve every problem. A user experience audit is only capable of identifying the following issues in a product:
- Spot usability issues
- Identify accessibility problems.
- Remove faulty links
- Plan better positioning and branding.
- Fix design inconsistencies.
- Fix navigational issues
- Make all the features simple to discover.
The importance of a UX design audit
We typically conduct audits on products that have been on the market for some time, providing you with a real-time data set to analyze their performance. Every time a product undergoes an update or redesign, the QA process includes these audits.
Here’s where things get interesting. Fixing the broken isn’t the only goal of a UX audit. It’s about boosting performance and unlocking your product’s full potential. Here’s how it can make a difference:
Cut through the noise: Most times, the reason for a user’s frustration might be too many steps included in the checkout process or a complex navigation flow. A UX audit can effectively identify and eliminate such issues.
Boost Accessibility: You may have dedicated several hours to incorporating a compelling feature into your app. However, upon reviewing your analytics and data, you find that users frequently avoid using this feature, which is a highly unlikely occurrence. Why? Users might miss out on accessing key features of an app due to poor design and placement of icons. A UX audit can help pinpoint where users drop off and why they’re missing out on the features they need most.
Optimize User Flows: There might be instances when you are using an app and suddenly the flow breaks, making you feel stranded amidst a task. Just as much as you hate it, users won’t like it either. Analyzing user movements during a UX design audit can help you improvise the user flow within an app and thereby elevate the user experience to a fantastic level.
Turn up the conversion rates: No matter what the task is, tweaking a little bit of your app’s design can increase the overall user engagement, thereby leading to huge gains in conversion and retention.
Why UX audit is considered a game changer?
At Expeed, while working on a SaaS platform, we launched a new feature that had the potential to grab a lot of attention from our users. But after the app launched, we noticed something odd—we never saw the engagement we expected with the new feature. So we dug through the data to determine why this was not happening.
After conducting a UX design audit, our team uncovered a surprising finding: the users were not aware that the application had added such a feature! Too many clicks and unclear terminology buried the feature.
After the audit, we were able to adapt steps to simplify user flow and make the feature more accessible for the users. Along with this, we tweaked the language used, and voila! We saw a 25% increase in feature adoption within a month.
This is why a user experience audit is so effective in identifying not only the issues but also the reasons behind them.
What Happens During a UX Audit?
A UX audit is generally more qualitative than quantitative and thus includes a number of steps. Here’s a breakdown of what you can expect.
Review of Business and User Objectives: To begin with, it is important to align your objectives. What is your aim? Increasing the conversions? Enhancing the use of certain features? The audit must focus on one specific area.
Analyze Metrics and Data: Evaluate any available analytical data from user analytics tools, collect insights and results to identify user drop-off points, compile a list of underutilized features, and understand how users navigate the product.
Heuristic Evaluation and Best Practices: You’ll also evaluate the design against established usability principles, like Nielsen’s heuristics, looking for areas where the interface falls short in terms of usability.
User Research: If needed, supplement the audit with user feedback—interviews, surveys, or usability testing—to capture the qualitative side of the story. This will give you an understanding of the motivations, pain points, and expectations of your users.
Actionable Recommendations: The result of the audit will give you a list of prioritized recommendations. These aren’t just “nice-to-haves”—they are specific, data-driven changes you can make to improve the user experience.
Who Should Conduct a User Experience Audit?
During specific stages of your product’s life cycle, a UX audit is particularly useful.
Before major redesigns or feature releases: If you’re planning to revamp your product or introduce new features, a UX audit ensures that your changes are user-centered and data-driven.
When Performance is Stagnant: If your product’s growth has plateaued, or if you’re seeing a high churn rate, conducting good UX audit services can help uncover the roadblocks preventing users from sticking around.
Regular Maintenance: Even if your product is performing well, a periodic UX audit every 1-2 years helps you stay ahead of user needs and keeps your experience fresh and relevant.
The Bottom Line
Conducting a UX audit will drive your app toward perfection by rooting out a few key underlying issues. It is all about making your users navigate through your app’s interface in a smooth and unfazed manner. Although it is important to conduct intermittent audits on an app to make sure it is up-to-date and flawless, if you ever notice your product underperforming and are unable to spot the cause, don’t wait. Conduct a UX audit and transform your application to be a user’s favorite!
A Product Designer with over 7 years of experience, Vinay has been guiding our team at Expeed on Usability, Responsive Web Design, Product Strategy, Prototyping, UX, and more. Driven by research findings and quantitative data, he believes in empathy-based designs that align with business and user goals. Outside Expeed, he offers mentorship to rookie designers to help them break into the world of design.
