Why Conduct a UX Audit and Its Benefits for Business

Imagine you run an online shop where you sell custom t-shirts. Thousands of users browse your website every day looking for the right product to buy. They check available options, add to cart favorite items, proceed to the checkout page, and then abandon the cart. You start wondering why. Is anything missing or unclear? You don’t know if your website needs some fixing or a major redesign.

Sooner or later, every website owner runs into these challenges and starts thinking about conversion rate optimization. However, the question is - how to figure out what needs optimization? There are many elements on-site, what should you prioritize?

As an expert UX agency, we will help you to discover what a UX audit is and how your business can benefit from conducting a usability audit. If you are looking for a partner agency to help you with a UX audit, let's get in touch.

Before we get to the practical steps, let’s first examine what the user experience audit is and when it's essential to do it.

• What is a UX audit?
• When to do a usability audit?
• What is the output of a UX audit?
• The business value of UX audit
• How much does a UX audit cost?
• How to conduct a UX audit

What is a UX audit?

A UX audit, also referred to as a usability audit, is the process of a website or a mobile app’s user interface evaluation. It’s a handy tool for those who want to identify usability problems in their digital products. UX audits can also help you detect problematic areas that make users abandon their journey and leave.

While a UX audit can't directly solve all the problems on a website or an app, it can be used to answer some profound questions:

• Where do users experience difficulties in understanding navigation or functionality?
• What does the data tell about users’ behavior and their needs?
• What can be potentially changed on a website or an app to improve its business performance?

The usability audit should help you define the core problems in your product, which, if tackled, can increase your product’s conversion rates, improve its usability and address your users' objections.

If you're looking for UX audit specialists, message us and book a free consultation with us. Our experts can thoroughly analyze your product, conduct usability testing, identify the core issues, and suggest the right next steps to improve its online performance.

Based on our experience, 5 user tests are enough to discover 80% of the usability problems.

For example, an online e-commerce store UX audit might reveal that users lack information about product delivery. It can also reveal that the payment options are limited and users don’t know how to pay. Moreover, if your checkout page endlessly loads, users will most likely close it in a few seconds. As a result, these issues could lead to a higher shopping cart abandonment rate on a site.

However, before you proceed with the usability evaluation, here is when it’s recommended to conduct a design audit to get the most out of it.

When to do a usability audit?

Let’s suppose you want to learn more about your users and grow your business faster. In that case, you will significantly benefit from a user experience audit no matter when it is done. Startups that want to validate their MVPs will find it extremely useful, too, be it a UX or UI audit.

Consider UX audit as a health check. It can be conducted at any stage of your product’s life cycle to identify current performance issues and areas for improvement.

Conduct a holistic design audit when you redesign a website or an app that’s been live for some time. It will help you assess existing user flows, detect problems, distractions, or bottlenecks that prevent users from taking the desired actions.

It's also useful to do an audit when you plan to develop and implement new functionality. A UX audit will help you understand if the new functionality is a valuable addition to your product and whether users need it. Besides, you will also know if your functionality is well-perceived by users and whether they experience any difficulty in navigation.

What is the output of a UX audit?

The UX audit findings are usually arranged in the report that contains:

• Project description and the main goals of the UX audit.
• Methodology. The report covers user behavioral information and quantitative metrics analyzed in the UX audit. It might include competitive analysis, user interviews, and testing data, customer journey mapping, A/B test details, and heuristic evaluation.
• Test results described in detail, highlighting the main pain points and potential areas for improvement.
• Priorities recommendations and suggestions that could improve the usability and maximize ROI.

There’s no universal format for the UX audit report since its size and structure depend on the work complexity.

For example, at UX studio, we create, share and present a user experience audit report to our partners, which contains all insights and discoveries based on empirical evidence. What is more, we also provide some handy, actionable recommendations on what to change in your digital product, and how to start making those changes.

UX audit for an English learning app

As a part of the UX audit mission, we also helped one of our partners, Xeropan, which is an English learning app, to increase their app-store conversion rate.

Multiple usability tests have been conducted to identify the problematic points in the Xeropan mobile app. We showed users the App Store mockups and asked them to share their app perception.

We also conducted in-person interviews with prototypes, where we asked participants the same questions and tried to understand the reasons behind their answers.

Eventually, our experts came up with many design changes that helped increase the app-store conversion and user retention.

We strive to collaborate with our partners in the long-term to show the value of UX design and align it with the development efforts.

The business value of UX audit

Usability audits can drastically improve your product performance, which might open up new business opportunities. Although usability audit isn't a magical pill to cure every product’s issue.

As a result of the usability audit:

• UX audit improves functionality.
• Improved functionality levels up customer satisfaction.
• Users no longer experience frustration or confusion.
• From the business perspective, a satisfied user means a higher conversion rate and better sales.

But does UX audit have any other monetary benefits for business? What’s in there for a company owner, CEO, or PM?

On average, businesses report a $100 ROI out of $1 invested in the UX.

While our study conducted among product teams revealed the following top 3 benefits of UX for business:

• Increased user satisfaction rate
• Reduced development costs
• Increased CR

One of our partners, a top travel company in France, Liligo, reported a 100% increase in bookings through the mobile app due to the UX redesign.

Research and data-driven decisions help your business lower customer handling and acquisition costs, increase CLV (customer lifetime value) and retention. UX audit enables you to reveal what exactly your users want and how to meet their needs.

Customers will appreciate you taking care of them. Good UX will make them feel grateful and increase their loyalty level. Hence, taking care of your product’s usability contributes to your business goals and gives you a tremendous competitive advantage.

UX audit has quite some benefits for the product design and development teams as well. PMs are concerned with making their digital products as useful and user-friendly as possible. They utilize the power of UX design audit to identify the root cause of such problems as high bounce, churn or drop rate, copy and navigation ambiguity, etc.

On the other hand, developers know what needs to be done to ensure prompt product upgrades and proper functionality.

How much does a UX audit cost?

The UX audit costs heavily depend on the scope and complexity of work, who you work with (is it an expert agency or an individual freelancer), and the duration of the UX audit.

If you would like to outsource it and hire external freelancers, be ready to invest at least $1,000 -$3,000 for a usability audit. For this amount, you should at least get a checklist with usability issues listed and explained.

Make sure to discuss the audit results with a freelancer. Moreover, check which research methods have been used to analyze your website performance.

We recommend conducting user testing and learn about usability issues from the actual users. Such research provides valid and thorough information about your product's performance.

Established agencies might charge from $7,000-$12,000 for an extensive usability audit lasting 2-4 weeks. Expert agencies usually allocate designers and researchers to work on product's audit. They examine the quantitative data, recruit participants for user testing and conduct interviews to learn about the product’s performance. Expert design agencies provide extensive UX audit reports and thrive to offer actionable steps to improve business performance.

How to conduct a UX audit

There is no officially accepted methodology on how to conduct the UX audit. Companies and individual UX professionals might approach it differently. However, the general steps and the ultimate goals are often similar. The actual process can differ depending on the product's complexity, the scope of work, and your goals.

As an expert design agency with over 10 years of experience, we have developed our own process that we apply for all research and audit works.

Here is our process, step-by-step. We aimed to make it simple, yet effective.

Step 1. Getting to know the product and business

At the beginning of the UX audit, it’s essential to get to know the product and the company’s business goals and then set up the key objectives and expectations for the usability and design audit.

We usually strive to meet our partners and conduct workshops, interviews to learn about the business and its current challenges. We aim to understand the target audience’s behavior, the parts that cause misunderstanding, the reasons behind a poor conversion rate, and user flows that require a revamp.

In case the product does not exist yet, we strongly recommend conducting discovery research, interviewing potential customers to learn about their needs, and checking the level of competition in your niche market.

The data collection step should help you understand the direction of the UX audit, the research methods to be used, and whether your goals are feasible to achieve.

Step 2. Collecting insights

At this step, UX experts should be already familiar with your product and its core problem whether it is a poor conversion rate, a high user drop rate, a new feature validation, etc.

As a part of the UX audit process, we test the actual product with your users to detect design flaws, areas that cause misunderstanding and adversely affect the product’s business performance.

At UX studio, we have a streamlined process to find usability test participants. Multiple channels are used from social media to professional networks and dedicated user recruitment partners to reach niche audiences. We choose the most suitable research methods to fit your needs and recruit participants from your target audience.

We use the results from the usability tests to create or iterate the prototype and re-test it with new users. Several ideation rounds help to accurately define the problematic product areas and come up with a solution that meets users’ and businesses’ needs.

The research phase can last from 2 to 4 weeks depending on the test results and the initial objectives.

Step 3. Compiling findings into the UX audit report

At the final step of the UX audit process, an auditor reviews the findings and prepares the short- and long-term recommendations that should improve your product’s usability and performance.

Expect to get the usability tests and interview recordings, quantitative data analysis insights alone with the UX audit report.

At UX studio, we always present the findings to our partners and comment on every suggestion to ensure the UX audit outcome is clear.

As an expert UX agency, we also help our partners implement the UX audit's suggested changes. Our UX experts often stay in touch as long-term partners, ready to assist any time.  It is important, though, to keep in mind that every UX audit mission is different, so we always adapt to our partners’ needs.

Need help with a UX audit?

If you would like to run a holistic audit of your product, discover the usability issues, and improve your product's performance — book a free hour-long consultation with us.

We will discuss your current goals and challenges and suggest how we can help you conduct the UX audit.

Our experts can thoroughly analyze your product, conduct usability testing, identify the core issues, and suggest the right next steps to improve its online performance.