Have you been noticing lately that your visitors don’t interact with your website as much as before? Are they leaving midway, not completing their actions successfully? If you are nodding in affirmation, it means that your website’s existing user experience is lacking in quality. While this is a matter of concern, the fact that you have figured it out means you have already taken the first step, even if you didn’t realize- being aware. 

You understand that your website is showing symptoms of poor UX. So, what can you do about it now? The second step is to prepare for action. When something is not right, and you want to fix it, what do you do? You figure out the wrong things and identify ways to correct them, right? In the UX world, you call this process UX Audit. 

A UX Audit is nothing but the assessment of the user experience. By conducting a UX audit on your website, you can gather information about the existing user experience issues and create a plan of action that will help you solve these issues. 

Why Should You Conduct a UX Audit

The digital world is continuously evolving. It could be that your website worked satisfactorily two years ago but is experiencing problems with user retention now. And that is normal. The changing nature of popular trends and user behavior makes it difficult for a website to remain relevant for years without needing any modification. This is why conducting a UX audit is important. 

A UX audit can help you figure out issues like

  • Why users aren’t taking certain actions
  • Where they are abandoning the website
  • Why they are leaving
  • What issues users are facing

After conducting a UX audit, you will be able to identify the positive and negative aspects of your website. You will have factual information based on which you can make informed decisions to overcome the negative and reinforce the positive. 

As a result of performing a UX audit on your website, you will be able to achieve

  • More leads and conversions
  • Improved sales
  • Create a better brand positioning
  • Increase user engagement and satisfaction

A UX audit is empowering and can help your business increase its ROI. Wondering how to conduct a UX audit? Let’s see that next. 

How to Conduct a UX Audit

A UX audit involves carrying out certain processes and strategies to create a careful analysis of a business and its digital solutions. Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to UX audit, there are some common steps involved in all audits. Some of these are: 

Stakeholder interviews

If you are conducting a design audit on your website, you should first be clear on the goal of the website. To identify the business goals, stakeholders interviews are the most efficient approach. It is best to conduct as many interviews as you can because it will give a broad range of insights from the people who really understand the essence of the business. The set of goals you gather from this step should be analyzed and made a report to ensure that the stakeholders’ priorities are reflected in the website redesign. 

User interviews

User interviews are important to identify different user personas and develop user journeys for your website. It is the foundation of building an incredible user experience. You may already have developed user personas for your website during the initial website design. If so, examine the personas and identify if they need to be reconsidered to reflect the business goals in their current state. If no such data has been collected before, conduct user interviews among your target audience to identify their thoughts, expectations, and behavior. 

Heuristic evaluation

To conduct an assessment of the usability of your website, you need to perform a heuristic evaluation. The evaluation is carried out based on a predefined set of heuristics and helps you identify different usability issues. One of the most widely used heuristic evaluation metrics is that of Jakob Neilson of the Neilson Norman group. It checks ten crucial principles, including visibility, consistency, flexibility, and aesthetics. 

You can also create your own heuristic evaluation metrics by incorporating aspects that are important to your website. If you are doing the heuristic evaluation using an in-house team, you should take care not to be biased and give honest feedback. 

User analytics

Quantitative data is always beneficial because it gives practical, accurate, and reliable information. When dealing with user experience design, gathering quantitative data can be very useful to generate better results. Tools like Google Analytics and Moz can be used to measure website traffic and evaluate detailed information about visitor behavior like how many users are visiting, where they are heading, what action they are taking, etc. 

Doing these four steps will get you started on the UX audit of your website. Now, depending on your need, time, and budget, you can choose to delve into more detail into each of these steps. A UX audit is an analysis and will help you find out the shortcomings of your website and give actionable insights towards taking the next step to improving your website experience. You can either do it on your own or hire a UI UX design agency to conduct it for you. Either way, it’s a good practice which you should definitely perform once every few years!