In today’s digital age, user experience is everything. From the aesthetic elements of your brand to your digital system's navigation and loading speeds, every UX design decision that you make has a part to play in the acquisition, retention and satisfaction of your users. But, how do we identify ways to improve user experience? The answer is UX auditing.

‍

With a well-structured UX audit, we can examine user pain points, spot usability issues, identify conversion blockers and so much more! 

Whether you need to transform your internal tools to make processes simpler for your staff or want to rise above your competitors and provide a flawless customer experience from start to finish, UX auditing is the first step to finding a solution.

So… What is UX design and auditing?

If you’ve stumbled across our page by chance, there’s a possibility that you already have some understanding of UX auditing and the UX design process. If that’s the case, go ahead and scroll on down to the benefits below. (There are plenty of cool features for you to discover, so we won’t be disappointed if you simply can’t wait to find out what they are!)

But, if you’re new to UX design and are finding it all a little overwhelming, fear not. UX, as a term, is actually pretty self explanatory. 

UX is essentially an acronym. The “U” stands for user and the ‘X’ stands for experience. 

Sandwich both of these letters together, stick design on the end, et voila, you get ‘UX design’ - pretty simple, right?

When we talk about UX design from a tech perspective, we’re referring to all of the elements that make up the customer journey or ‘user experience’. From landing on your web app to locating your menu, tapping your service buttons and then submitting a form or purchasing -  EVERY step of this process is part of the UX design. 

If the UX design of your app or digital system isn’t well thought out, it will fail to meet the requirements of the user and can actually become more of a hindrance than a help. In fact, we could probably sit here and write a whole article about the problems of bad UX design but we’ll save that one for another day…

For now, the most important thing to remember is that quality UX design should never be overlooked.

Good UX design is not just an added bonus or ‘a nice thing to have’, it’s an essential component that helps to guarantee meaningful user experiences and keep people coming back.

The UX Audit

Most people are familiar with the term ‘audit’. It’s something that is used across nearly all sectors and industries to spot trends, data patterns, barriers, opportunities… the list goes on.

Therefore, when we use the term ‘UX audit’, it is exactly what you’d imagine - a systematic evaluation process that can help us to make smarter, more strategic decisions that improve the user experience. 

Most often, UX audits are undertaken to analyze mobile applications and other software products. By gathering valuable data and information from these products, we can make improvements, troubleshoot issues and ensure that everything is working like a charm!

When do we carry out a UX audit?

When it comes to UX audits, there are no rules in place to dictate when you should or shouldn’t carry out an audit, however, there are some specific scenarios within which UX auditing can be extremely valuable. 

Here are just a few…

Redesign or major updates

When planning a redesign Digital product or significant updates to an existing digital product, a UX audit can provide valuable insights into the current user experience and allows you to spot opportunities for improvement.

​​Pre-launch or early-stage

Conducting a UX audit before launching a new digital product is a great way to test its capabilities and helps to iron out any issues prior to public release.

Post-launch evaluation

After launching a digital product, there might be a few things that you need to go back and tweak. A post-launch UX audit can be conducted to reassess your product’s performance, gather user feedback, and make final changes. This evaluation helps to fine-tune the user experience and address any unforeseen issues that may have arisen.

Decreased user engagement

If user engagement metrics decline or there is a decrease in user satisfaction, a UX audit is a really useful way to help uncover the root causes. By using a UX audit to analyze user behavior, feedback, and performance metrics, you can identify areas that may be hindering user engagement and put them right.

Competitive analysis

A UX audit can also be used for benchmarking purposes, comparing the user experience of your digital product against competitors or industry standards. This helps you to recognise areas where you can differentiate and improve your UX to gain a competitive edge.

Now that we’ve covered the importance of UX design and UX auditing, let's take a look at some of the key benefits!

Identifying Pain Points

When conducting a UX audit, most beady-eyed UX designers will be on the lookout for user pain points that may be disrupting the user journey. If you’re a B2B or B2C company, it’s critical that you iron out any design flaws that could prevent your customer or client from engaging. 

When we think about the things that could prevent a user from completing a desired action, there are a few things that might spring to mind. For example, broken CTA buttons, forms or links. However, even the most subtle design defects can affect the user experience and have an impact on engagement. 

When you enlist the help of an experienced UX designer, they will pick up on both the obvious flaws and the subtleties to ensure that you have every chance of keeping the user engaged. 

Enhancing User Satisfaction

Whether you’re conducting a UX audit for a customer-facing product or an internal system, user satisfaction is key. At the end of the day, your product should be able to meet the needs and expectations of its users and, if it doesn’t, it’s not doing its job.

To understand the effect that UX design can have on user satisfaction, check out the following examples:

Business system

Ever been browsing a digital system on your mobile device, only to find that the text is cut off and you can’t locate the navigation menu? Since you can’t navigate the system or locate what you’re looking for, you decide to abandon ship. You might even feel obliged to share your frustrations with other users and discourage them from visiting the site.

Internal user applications

Perhaps, you’ve tried logging into an employee portal and have been unable to access your tasks, timesheet, workflow or instant messaging. Without access to these vital features, you’re left wondering what to do next. Maybe, you attempt to call IT or find alternative solutions but, by this point, you’ve spent over an hour trying to troubleshoot issues that could have been easily avoided with quality UX design.

What are the consequences?

With customer products, you’re more likely to end up with low customer retention rates, customer mistrust, and a poor brand reputation. 

With internal applications, poorly designed processes can lead to low staff morale, decreased productivity, and even, a higher staff turnover. 

But, remember, these things are easily avoidable and CAN be put right!

By conducting a thorough UX audit, you can alleviate user frustration and ensure that your products are fit for purpose. 

Improving Accessibility

Your UX design plays a critical role in ensuring that your products and services are accessible to all. 

When we undertake UX design, we need to make sure that our applications create inclusive experiences that cater to a diverse range of users. With a comprehensive UX audit, we can look at features such as color contrast, ease of navigation, keyboard accessibility, alt text and visual hierarchy.

By examining these features and taking accessibility into account, we can create or adapt existing tools to facilitate equal access for users with both physical disabilities and neurodiverse conditions.

Save Time and Money

Time and money can be a major concern for many businesses, particularly during periods of significant growth. With higher staff volumes, an increased workload and an expanding customer or client base, the need to tighten purse strings and prioritize effective time management becomes increasingly more important. 

Luckily, for business owners, UX audits can contribute significantly to cost and time savings by preventing the need for expensive remedial actions in the future. 

By detecting and addressing issues early on, businesses can avoid the expenses associated with redesigns or extensive revisions. This proactive approach allows for a timely resolution of usability concerns, ultimately minimizing the resources and expenses required to rectify problems later down the road.

What’s more, if you decide to undertake a UX audit before developing an app for internal processes, your UX designer can facilitate your company expansion by implementing enhanced workflows, better employee management and an overall more structured system. It’s a win-win situation!

Understanding Your Audience

Earlier on, we touched upon the ways that UX auditing can be used to increase engagement rates for B2C and B2B companies. But, in order to understand what it is that makes your users engage with your system you need to carefully consider your UX personas. 

When we talk about UX personas, we’re referring to fictional representations of your target audience, whether it be their name, age, buying habits or other behaviors. 

By considering audience demographics and figuring out their goals and motivations, we can make more informed design choices and tailor products to suit customer needs. When implementing a UX audit, we can use this information to map out the customer journey and assess the relevance of your offering to that user. 

Then, if we notice that there are various touch points missing from the process, we can document these in a gap analysis and use them to enhance the product. 

‍

How to Conduct a UX Audit of Your Digital Product?

UX audit is conducted in various stages to find out the usability of the website, mobile app, and digital products. It starts with preparations for the audit, gathering all documents, and then going towards the main assessment stage as listed below:

STEP 1: Prepare for the Success

Now, this is the stage in which you plan and set several benchmarks and create a checklist to evaluate your digital product. Here, in the UX audit preparation part, your UX strategy plays quite a vital role.

So, here are the initial stages to prepare for the UX audit drive:

1. Understanding the product and business type by briefly navigating it;
2. Interviewing stakeholders (business owners, project managers, customer support team, etc.) to know their pain points, business objectives, and gather as much information as possible to better understand the goal and conduct audit accordingly;
3. Gather existing documentation related to your digital product, such as design and brand guidelines and previous UX research reports.

After getting all this information on the table, it’s time to kick-start the UX audit process.

STEP 2: Product Understanding & User Persona Creation

During interviewing stakeholders and briefly reviewing it for the first time, UX auditors usually get a basic idea about the product. However, to conduct the UX audit, they do need to study the product thoroughly to understand everything about it, including concept, user needs, user journey, and much more.

So, during this thorough product exploration phase, auditors learn about the product type, its focus user base, and business model type to further scope the UX audit process.

After their product exploration phase, they come up with the user persona, identifying the strategies to make their journey exciting and meaningful.

Now, what’s this user persona for the UX audit?

A user persona is a semi-functional character that UX designers create by listing down their name, occupation information, understanding levels, personal summary, and pain points when exploring the product, needs, and providing solutions to ease their journey throughout the product. In short, a user persona is more likely a portrayal of a real user in particular. And this user persona looks something like this:

This user persona helps product stakeholders understand users’ needs to use this tool expertly. It shows the overall brief review of the user, where he/she faces difficulties, and where the improvement is necessary.

STEP 3: Defining Scope of the UX Audit

Now, this is the most important process that helps UX designers define the required timeline and milestones to complete the thorough audit of the product, along with the prioritization.

In this process, 4-5 auditors analyze the product parallelly to come up with a list of focus areas (product features, visual appealingness, navigation) to scope the audit stage and let the stakeholders know the features and product parts to prioritize.

It may seem like a simple task, but contains extensive industry experience to scope the audit process that fits into a business owner’s budget and timeframe. 

After this, a comprehensive heuristic evaluation starts, the main process we all are waiting for to reveal.

STEP 4: Usability Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation is performed thoroughly to discover usability issues of the digital product. It’s performed by UX designers/auditors with the use of the rule of thumb to discover:

1. Usability issues
2. Hidden opportunities
3. Roadblocks in the user’s journey to the product
4. Prioritize optimization needs

If done with professional UX designers, a walkthrough will be taken on the way users navigate through the app and explore core features just after signing up from the free as well as paid users’ perspective. It requires designers to be realistic as much as possible to avoid designers’ bias.

In this process, some teams may prefer to include both professional UX designers and users to do the screen-by-screen evaluation to find gaps. When doing this test with the users, NN Group suggests involving not more than five users to save time and learn most of the things.

Because more users are involved with the process, the learning process for heuristic evaluation will lower down, leading to a splurge of time, resources, and money.

However, to conduct the heuristic evaluation precisely, you need to follow Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics, which are:

1. Visibility of System Status: This focuses on design, which should inform users about the process with appropriate feedback, like where they are currently and where they should go to reach their destination.
2. Match Between the System and the Real World: In this, the design should speak users’ language by stating keywords that users can easily understand.
3. User Control and Freedom: There are chances that users may end up at the location they don’t want to, so to take the “emergency exit.” So, this evaluation is to discover that quick button to roll back rather than leaving the whole digital site.
4. Consistency and Standards: The right placement of the right element without creating diversion or confusion for users is the most important rule in the design, which must be met.
5. Error Prevention: Having a creative error message is important, but a safe design preventing problems is essential. So, this study focuses on that.
6. Recognition Rather Than Recall: This assessment looks for the design navigation and provides comments to improve the design flow to make users easily understand such without having any extra cognition load.
7. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use: Design should have two approaches one is regular navigation and another is the shortcut for the expert users to take the fastest possible route.
8. Aesthetics and Minimalist Design: It shows that the user interface should contain only the necessary information that a user should know and perform rather than making it crowded with too much information.
9. Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors: If the user attempts to navigate in the wrong direction, it should provide an error message in a simple way like “Oops! Looks like you’re lost!,” and suggest the best possible solution.
10. Help & Documentation: Good product design doesn’t need further explanations. However, it’s nice to have something for users to refer to. So, it ensures that product design onboard a user with a quick start guide to use the app.

Apart from this, it’s really important for UX evaluators to flag issues with its codes when doing Usability Heuristic Audit. When doing so, they mainly take a top-down approach to set priorities in two categories for stakeholders to understand and fix based on the metrics given.

Those prioritization categories are: 

1. Ease-to-Fix: It flags issues from E1 – E5 ratings, where E1 stands for hard to fix, easing down to E5 – which is easy to fix.‍
2. Severity Metrics: They flag issues based on the severity they can cause in the user experience. Here, it states severity from S1 – S5, where S1 stands for most easy to fix, leveling up to S5, which is very hard to fix.

Here, severity metrics are flagged with their ranks with issues, type like:

• Cosmetic Issues: These issues are related to color schemes, shapes, and other appealing factors.
• Irritant Issues: It checks for the alignment and selection of design elements, including navigation choices that may irritate users to prioritize your website, mobile app, or digital product.
• Minor Issues: It’s the sub-category combining all the design-related factors creating a minor impact on user experience, yet necessary to fix and also the easy ones.
• Major Issues: These are the quiet to consider issues on priority, which must be addressed to elevate the user experience.
• Usability Catastrophic: These issues are the disasters in the design, which must-must be addressed and, in the most possible scenarios, are suggested to be redesigned or replaced by effective solutions.

So, this usability heuristic evaluation is performed to discover as many issues as possible to optimize the product to the fullest in the usability wise.

STEP 5: Visual Heuristic Evaluation

This one is our own developed heuristic evaluation that adds up to the usability evaluation. And helps our clients get a thorough UX audit report to optimize their business-essential digital products. This evaluation is done by considering visual design factors like:

• Alignment: Analyzing the product to check the visual appealingness in terms of alignment consistency;
• Hierarchy: A proper order of each feature and action is checked, and suggested edits to change the sequence to make users’ journey on the product smooth like butter;
• Contrast: Analyzing color combinations, we know as color palettes/schemes used in the product UI design, to check their compatibility with and how they complement each other. And if they are not matching up, what would be the ideal fit for the same? That’s all they help to find.
• Visual Balance and Rhythm (Consistency): Here, we check the consistency of the alignment, color selection, design objects used, and the format of all pages. So, your users don’t get surprised by opening any one page of your product that is designed differently than other pages.
• Affordance: You must be thinking that it’s the term related to the money factor. In UX, it isn’t! It’s the term related to how quickly a user can understand your product design by just having a glance at it. It’s just like learning to use a pen and hanging it on the shirt or pant’s pocket, just by looking at its design.

Along with these points, visual heuristics also evaluates the accessibility of the product for different groups of users with different types of visual disabilities. To help you make the product more visually appealing and accessible for every user.

STEP 6: Writing a UX Audit Report

Now comes the most important part of the UX audit, which is to create its audit report by listing down all findings from the product UX assessment processes. 

Remember that you are building this report for the product stakeholders, project managers, and development team to refer to; hence, it’s necessary to ensure its clarity in content word choice and representation.

When creating the UX audit report, evaluators also represent issues with effective solutions and remarks to consider at the time of optimization.

But how is it included in the UX audit report? So, the UX audit report is created with:

• An executive summary of the report;
• A project brief with a list of users and their experiences, the scope of the audit, platforms used for the audit;
• A little bit of explanation about the evaluation framework: the research and the methods to be involved;
• User persona with user type, information, pain points, and objectives;
• Tables of usability heuristics and visual heuristics overviews with focus area ;
• A thorough usability analysis of each feature with the issue types, violation types, prioritization keys, and recommendations;
• A thorough visual heuristic evaluation report with issue types, violation types, prioritization keys, and recommendations;
• Top recommendations that should be implemented for better user experience.

Every organization uses different approaches to create UX audit reports based on their set priorities, but the above-mentioned one is the most recommended one from Zignuts’s UX evaluators.

How will UX Experts at Zignuts Bring Value for Your Digital Product?

You’ll find countless reasons to not do a UX audit of your digital products, which are – it’s a time-consuming process, quite cost-intensive one, and many others. But do you know what can influence you more to go for the UX audit service? It’s the ROI solely. And that’s the reason why you must hire UX auditors for your project by considering many things, including interviews and the assessment process.

It can be tiring work, right? Need a head start? Zignuts can be your ideal UX research, design, and audit partner with full-cycle product development offerings. We have highly skilled UX talents with extensive knowledge and experience in doing UX research and auditing and offering world-class UX recommendations that boost users’ journey in your product, leading to better business benefits.

What Next?

Our experienced team of UX designers and developers will explore the ins and outs of your existing products so that we can enhance user satisfaction, increase revenue and enable you to stand out from your competitors. 

Ready to elevate your digital product's user experience? At Zignuts, we specialize in UI/UX and graphic design services that drive user satisfaction and business success. Our expert team is dedicated to delivering innovative solutions tailored to your needs. Explore how we can transform your digital presence by visiting our UI/UX and Graphics Design Services page. Let's create exceptional experiences together!