If you are running an e-commerce project or an e-shop, you may find some customers that do visit your page through search engines, and even spend time on your website till they reach the checkout process but they eventually fail to convert.
And if you’re wondering why it happens then this is the perfect time to have a UX audit that can assist you in authenticating your hypothesis. UX audit can reveal those parts of your website that need your immediate attention and concern because it may be giving unprecedented headaches to your users. In this way, this audit helps in making all the processes easier for your users to boost the conversion rate and ultimately, your business.
It is very important to understand how users or visitors interact with your website. UX audit assists you in this kind of understanding. It also helps in revealing the areas which need immediate improvement or renovation. But the most important function of UX audit is that it tells you all the recommendations that can upgrade or renew your website altogether.
Your e-commerce project can have various areas that need remodelings such as the area of user flow, visual or content information, or the information hierarchy. You should keep in mind that every website is different from the other. So, the degree of change or the areas of weaknesses vary from one website to the other. Similarly, the improvements made to such weaknesses also vary. Because each website consists of various problematic parts or hurdles that can influence the users in a negative way and endanger the entire performance of your website. You may have a “hot tip” about where the problem is lying but you need solid data or evidence to prove that. On the contrary, the real users having a real experience can differentiate right from wrong straight away.
This is where UX audit steps in and identifies where to start by using a set of data and tools which include Google analytics, video-recording, heatmaps, software for eye-tracking, and some other innovative tools. These tools provide you with a rough overview of the areas which are working efficiently and the others which show some irregularities such as:
As already mentioned, each business has its own needs and therefore, each business needs a different approach. For example, for one business, you can simply increase a metric and let it handle the rest of the work. UX audit is all about making up your site based on the behavior of your users. It strives to make the journey along with the browsing experience of your customers as easy as possible.
But you must know one thing – how the real people interact or work with your website.
I’ve gathered that UX audit consists of seven different stages which I will discuss in the next section. For each project, these stages remain the same, however, the sub-stages may show variance. These seven stages are:
Once you’re done with the seven stages, you need to go through it once again. This is to ensure the efficient working of your website and to know if everything is working as intended. Once you are done with this, you can move onto other areas that need your attention.
A famous basketball player Kobe Bryant once said,
“We were never satisfied, never finished. We will never be retired.”
The same applies to the UX users – we always want to go big because good enough isn’t what we want for our businesses.
Building your own business or a company is a constant and continuous process. Likewise, the development of your site is also a constant struggle. You need to give your site some time and motivation to make it bigger which, in turn, helps in growing your business. Therefore, you need to keep your site up-to-date if you don’t want your business to crush down in the dynamic market, and to keep your site up, a UX audit is the way to go.
Now, you are familiar with the reasons behind using UX audit and with this, I’m moving on to the next most important question i.e., how much does UX audit cost?
The price of UX audit varies widely. It varies from client to client, from service to service, and from projects to projects. Some projects can be extremely complicated while others are much easier to handle. Sometimes, it only takes a couple of minutes to understand the functionality of your site. On the other hand, it may need two weeks to properly interact with your team to understand your business. Some work can require full dedication and hard work while others can require minute polishes. It all depends on the kind of business.
With that being said, I will tailor my services according to your needs and requirements. The cost of the UX audit will depend upon the scale and size of the tasks I will receive during our contract. Large-scale businesses will require more time. That’s a given. But small-scale tasks will take up much more time because even for the smaller tasks, the whole setup will be installed to educate you and your team.
Therefore, after evaluating everything on the project, I come up with the price for my UX services. This evaluation will include a thorough analysis of your project, app, or website that needs improvement. My services can also extend up to telling you how you can interpret the data and what you can do regularly to make your website efficient.
I’m going to start with the big and the most-asked question, what exactly takes place during a UX audit? During this audit, the person who is auditing will utilize a set of tools, metrics, and methods to examine the product and pinpoint the area where it is going right or wrong. This include:
Now, most of you may be thinking that a UX audit and usability testing are similar but there is a significant difference between the two – the flow direction of information. The usability testing deduces all the problems from the actions of the users whereas the UX audit deduces the problems from a distinguished set of pre-determined goals or standards.
This question can take me a while to answer because now I’m going to thoroughly discuss all the seven stages of UX audit. Here we go:
To get something right, you need to ace the first stage. In the case of UX audit, the first stage is understanding the goals and objectives of the business regarding the product that you are about to audit. Depending upon the client, this statement can have a lot of different meanings which I’m going to clarify.
For example, if your business consists of a built-in UX audit team then all of you remain familiar with the goals and objectives of the business. However, if you are from the outside UX audit team and you work with a complex product, you first need to understand what that business wants to achieve in the future or what its goals are. The most convenient way to do is by giving out a survey to the stakeholders asking everything you need to know about the product which can include why designed the product in this way, what were the core points they encountered and what they would want us to improvise. If you need further information, you can conduct one-on-one interviews with the stakeholders which can include developers, salespeople, product managers, marketers, representatives of customer service, and many more. Such one-on-one interviews can help you in evaluating what each individual thinks about the product and what should be done to make it better. You need to collect their point of view regarding the product’s improvement and how that improvement can help grow the business in the long run.
These interviews can help you understand the business’s objectives better rather than just coming out with the general set of objectives. Vernon Joyce, a digital designer, points out that objectives shouldn’t be packed and should be well-defined.
If a company says that it wants to increase sales, you will need to understand what this part means and then start the process of auditing. Does it mean that the company wants to grow in-store purchases? Or does it want to sell a product more? These questions will be easy to answer once you conduct those interviews.
However, once you collect all the necessary data, you must present a draft to your client or the employer to see that you both are on the same page and that you understand the objectives of the business.
The next stage of UX audit consists of getting familiar with your users by making user personas. User personas are the kind of fictional users that can help you create a better understanding of the customers. There are some companies who already have sufficient information regarding their customers which they have taken from a set of in-depth interviews and surveys. From this information, you can create numerous user personas.
On the other hand, if you have enough time, you can conduct one-on-one interviews with about five to ten customers. In these interviews, you will present the product to the customers and ask about their experience. For this task, numerous interview protocols are used each of which consists of different levels of details. However, you must ensure that that you’re following the same procedure and the setup for each user.
Once you get the user insights from stage two of the UX audit, you then move on to turning these insights into user flows. These user flows will assist you in establishing the objectives of the users in various parts of the products. It will also help you get a clear idea of the steps that they will take to reach there. The most important part of this stage is that it will help you to identify the areas where the user can head down the wrong way or come across some complications.
These user flows should not only be created from the user personas but should also be based on the information compiled by the interviews with the stakeholders, user surveys, and interviews with the users. If you don’t know how to make a user flow, keep on reading. I’ll teach you how to make one in the next section.
I’ve seen that most of the companies use Google Analytics to track the performance of their mobile products along with their website. But during a UX audit, this data holds no significant importance. It provides quantitative data that remains unquestionable because it is about the interaction the customers have with your product and things they’re doing while they’re on your website.
If you want a more advanced approach, you can supplement the data of Google analytics with a bunch of tools such as CrazyEgg or Kissmetricsv. But this will take more time and budget. You should keep this in mind that no matter which analytics you choose, you must take a long period of time because only then you will be able to spot the trends of how a certain digital product is consumed over this period of time.
The fifth and important stage of UX audit consists of heuristic evaluation. If you are a professional UX designer, you know that if you want to make your digital products user-friendly, they must follow the usability heuristic. In this evaluation, you’ll remember everything you compiled from the user personas and objectives and go through the product as a normal user. As you are trying to accomplish a series of tasks, you should try to visit the website from the point of view of the users. In this way, you’ll develop a better understanding of how you can meet their objectives. Whenever you go through a pain point or encounter a challenge, don’t forget to take screenshots or notes. This can help you to form the basis of an in-depth evaluation such as that of 10 usability heuristics of Jakob Nielsen.
For example, if you have a full team for this evaluation, each member of the team will evaluate each step on the website so that you don’t miss out on any step and gain as much information as possible.
At the end of the UX audit, the auditor assembles all the findings and then make relative recommendations to the client. Once you’re done with all the steps and gathered useful information, you should start analyzing it to gain more insights into how this product is being consumed by the users and what difficulties they face. All this information should be documented to present to the client.
You should also provide the client with some recommendations on how he/she can make the site better. For example, if you get to know that a user is having problems in locating a specific information piece because it requires too many steps, you can ask the client to put a link on the home screen so that users can find it easily on your website.
However, your recommendations must be presented in the most effective way. Words can be effective but you should try to be more creative. You can use prototypes, wireframes, site maps, graphs, etc. While providing your recommendations and findings, you should focus on providing improvements for the weak points in the website rather than being too critical. You much acquire a positive approach.
That’s it folks! These were all the stages of conducting a UX audit. Summing it up, we see that:
When you start a UX audit, take some time to understand the objectives of the business regarding the product that is going to be audited. Conducting interviews with the stakeholders is the best way to accomplish that.
The second stage consists of understanding the users of the products and their objectives. You can acquire this information through user surveys, user personas, and interviews with the users. You can, thereby, create user flows by undertaking the information gathered from these surveys and interviews.
The way the users consume a digital product can help you gain quantitative data that can be compiled through mobile or website analytics. To spot the trends, it is mandatory to compile the data over a long period of time.
Then comes the stage of heuristic evaluation in which you explore the product according to the point of view of the user. A pre-determined set of heuristics should guide this process.
In the end, all the information collected from the audit should be documented after thorough analysis and evaluation. This document should clearly convey all that you found during this audit. You should also make relative recommendations to the client to provide effective solutions or improvements to the uncovered areas during the audit.
Now, you know that UX audit isn’t an easy task to be done. A professional can get the job done in a better way. So, you might want someone who can get it done for you.
UX audit can help you in answering a lot of questions that can assist you in thinking straight. These questions can be:
If the UX audit is done right away, it can prove to be very beneficial for your product. It doesn’t go with hunches instead it uses empirical evidence to provide commanding follow-up activities. The strategy advised by UX audit is unmatched and it produces such metrics that can be efficiently used in the future. It also aids in producing hypotheses that can tell you why your users are acting in this way and how they may behave in the upcoming future. However, the most important benefit of UX audit is that it boosts up your ROI along with the conversion once the action of a follow-up is taken.
To do a UX audit, you need to first compile a team of developers, business managers, professional designers, and product strategists. Then this team should nominate the leader of the audit who can make effective decisions in the given timeframe and process. There are some other measures that must be agreed upon before you start the auditing. These include:
If there is a good cash flow, it is advised that you must do the UX audit using an external party. This is because it is quite difficult for the internal parties to keep their distance and prejudices aside from the product. However, if you don’t have a sufficient cash flow and want to internally audit your product then that can be possible too. You just need to follow the objective process, understand, and utilize a wide array of tools that can help you in auditing. If you don’t know the basics or the important tools used for the UX audit, don’t worry, I can teach you all of that. I can guide you about what you should study? Which tools you should be using and how do they work? I can tell you everything you need to know.
I believe that UX audit must be done in the very beginning steps of redesigning your website, app, web application, or any other project. These kinds of audits usually take place when the service or the product has lived for quite some time and it has sufficient data backlog for us to evaluate and analyze. It is best to put through your projects with usability testing when you have added new products or features.
Companies that have an in-built UX audit team continue to take benefit from this auditing whereas those companies who don’t have this team can hire it and do the auditing once in a while.
If you can get through the first stage of the UX audit, the rest of the stages come to your naturally. If you have all the information you need, you can properly define the goals before setting on your UX audit journey. But, for this, you’ll need some materials and metrics which I’m going to demonstrate below.
Visit the website according to the perspective of the customers. It can be termed as the cognitive walkthrough that can enable you to take notes to achieve the goals of your users. This process can make your whole task extremely difficult. Therefore, you need to focus on this evaluation by using the heuristics of Nielson.
The heuristic evaluation will provide you with the qualitative data and the analytics tools can provide you with the quantitative data. If a person wants to know the trends over time, flow ad source of the traffic, he/she needs to understand the fundamental functions of Google analytics. Much more advanced functions can help you to clearly understand the conversion hotspots, user flows within the website, etc. You can use a number of tools to do this but you need to go back well in time to figure out the trends to audit.
Another thing that can be useful to the UX audit is the premise of your app or site. If it is e-commerce, download, or sales figures, it can prove to be very beneficial. For instance, at Justfreetools, I figure out the number of readers who use our tools along with the post from which they have downloaded. This provides me with the insight that helps me to fathom how a certain content fits with the experience of the users.
If you want to do an efficient UX audit, you need to step foot in the real world and conduct some interviews and surveys to gather their insights. You can also ask for their opinion on this audit that will help in generating good faith. If the sales or marketing department has ever conducted a survey, you can ask for it and get immense feedback and comments on the digital product. You can then divide this feedback into a number of categories.
Previous requirements of the product
If you want to know exactly what happened with the product, you can ask for the original requirements for the given application. It will give you an idea of the product’s design and features. You can then make relative and actionable recommendations to improve it.
Now, pause for a while and authenticate the collected qualitative date by putting it through <em”>usability tests.
For example, if a previous survey claims that a customer had some problem during a checkout process, conduct this test to see if this unsupported claim can be backed up.
One word, spreadsheets. Whatever you collect in the first step of the UX audit must be presented on a worksheet to be aggregated. After that, upload this sheet onto Cloud to make it a collaborative document where you can record ideas along with the questions. If you don’t know the working of the spreadsheet, you can use the following templates to get an idea:
The most nerve-wracking moment is turning the data into informative insights. It is often considered as a humungous issue to convert the metrics into meaningful changes. However, there are several methods that can help you in understanding the data in front of you. These methods include card sorting (it is perfect to aggregate any set of information rather than just UX audit), insight incubation, and data mining. To find more patterns in UX research, check out the post of Steve Baty in UX matters.
Now is the time to answer the most important question that why do users interact in their own way rather than doing what the stakeholders want them to? To answer this question, you can compare the user insights compiled against the following four fundamentals:
Lastly, the recommendations for the improvements of UX that are all driven by data can be written. But you need to make those recommendations as relevant as possible. In describing usability problems: are we sending the right message?, Rolf Molichn, Robin Jeffries, and Joseph Dumas provide such recommendations that made me their fans. The key takeaways are:
One more thing to understand is that instead of identifying the areas that need an immediate response, you should be giving out supplement recommendations with examples that can enhance the functionality of the website.
The product along with the finalized objectives that are going to be audited will tell you which resource kit you will need for its auditing. However, there are some basic resources that will help you in getting started which are mentioned below:
It is quite difficult to find the most suitable software for your project but I can get rid of that problem for you.
You need professional UX audit or UX consultant? Then you can email me at info@krcmic.com, call at +420 722 829 579 or use the form below. Would you like to expand your business network? Then don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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