The user experience (UX) of your website or app can make or break your business. A smooth, intuitive UX keeps users engaged, while a clunky, confusing one drives them away. This is where a UX audit becomes invaluable. A UX audit is essentially a health check for your product, pinpointing any areas where users may be getting stuck, frustrated, or lost. By conducting regular UX audits, you can ensure your product remains user-friendly, converting visitors into (mostly) happy customers.
In short, a UX audit helps you stay aligned with your users’ needs, expectations, and behaviours, which, alongside industry best practices, ensures your product continually delivers value.
A UX audit might sound complicated, but in its simplest form it can serve as a preliminary examination, mapping out the current “state-of-play” and calling out the most obvious problem areas. Taken a step further, a UX audit can become a more comprehensive assessment, taking into account multiple pages (if not the whole site) in a holistic “tidy up” that seeks to identify the problems, provide solutions and generate hypotheses for future testing and optimisation.
For the most part though, UX audits will follow a similar foundational structure, with different research and assessment methods that can be used on an “ad hoc” basis.
1. Understand the Problem(s)
The first step when conducting an audit, particularly with fresh eyes across a new product or website, is to understand the current problems. Often these will be predetermined by the goals of the business and any research already gathered. From this key metrics and KPIs that we are concerned with can be identified and used to benchmark moving forward.
If, however, the problems are unknown and/or the data is yet to be gathered, we as UX designers must seek them out!
2. Set Goals
Here, if nothing is provided, is where it falls to the UX designer to go digging. Be it through talking to stakeholders, parsing through data or analytics tools (think Google Analytics, Hotjar etc), or even conducting fully-fledged user interviews, there are numerous ways to identity what metrics we should be most concerned with. This can also provide a steer in terms of the problem areas of the site.
3. Gather the Goods
Building upon our understanding of what we want to improve, it is now time to identify which areas, pages, tasks, or flows may be the culprit. Again, making the most of tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar, we can take a deep-dive into how users behave – where they click, where they don’t, how far they scroll, how long they stay, and where they drop off (to mention but a few). If interviews are off the cards, then data of this kind is second-to-none.
4. Walk in Your User’s Shoes
User flows and journey mapping: the bread and butter of a UX designer. Imagine you’re a user going through your site or app for the first time. Does everything make sense? Is it easy to get from point A to point B, or do you get lost? Map out this journey and look for spots where people might be struggling. Those are the areas you’ll want to fix. Couple this with the depth of understanding gained from the behavioural data and you should have a comprehensive understanding of what is going wrong and why.
5. Check the Visuals
Sometimes finding the problem doesn’t require a dig into reems and reems of data – sometimes it is staring you right in the face. Take a look at your design. Are the buttons big enough to click? Does the layout make sense? Are the fonts easy to read? Make sure everything is clear and looks good, especially on mobile devices. Sometimes what seems like a deeply complex problem can have a remarkably simple solution.
6. Create an Action Plan
Now that you know what’s working and what’s not, it’s time to put together a game plan. Tackle the big issues first—like fixing confusing navigation or slow-loading pages—then move on to smaller tweaks. Prioritize the changes that’ll make the biggest impact.
And that’s it! A UX audit doesn’t have to be a scary, technical process. It’s just about making your product more user-friendly so that people have a smooth and enjoyable experience.
Kitty will be attending the Technology for Marketing at the ExCeL Centre this week if you’d like to chat this through further.
Please do get in touch here and together, we can find a way to make the user experience of your site seamless.
