How to Conduct a Successful UX Audit for Your Digital Product

Don’t develop a product! Develop a product your customers want. To do this you’ll need to conduct a UX audit for your product, learn how here.

UX Audit for Your Digital Product

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

 

So you develop a product idea, create it, and release it later on to the market. After that, the responsibility doesn’t shift to the marketing, sales, and service departments. 

 

It’s up to you to keep making essential changes. It’s crucial, more than ever, as technology keeps evolving rapidly. New trends come in, and you need to keep up with all of these. 

 

There could also be a time that your product performance drops. It would help if you incorporated new ideas to know the reason behind this, and a UX audit is highly recommended.

 

What is a UX audit?

 

A UX audit helps you identify issues that could affect user experience on your digital products, like your applications and websites. 

 

While this strategy won’t solve your existing problems, it will allow you to answer some crucial questions: 

  • What particular elements in your applications or websites frustrate your conversions and affect your conversions? 
  • What do statistics say about the behaviors and requirements of users?
  • What are the improvements that need to make it boost the performance of your business?

 

According to a report, companies risk losing their audience if they have a slow-loading site or one that’s difficult to use. A UX audit not only focuses on how a site is aesthetically and consistently designed but also allows you to devise a strategic plan to improve your online presence. Check out these handy ways to redesign an app or a website. 

 

Ways to Conduct a Successful UX Audit for Your Digital Product

 

Whatever situation you’re in right now, doing a UX audit helps you develop the solution you’re looking for. We’ll walk you through some handy and practical steps to help you develop a successful YX audit. 

 

From understanding your business objectives to compiling findings and making recommendations, these steps will allow you to develop websites that are highly effective and attractive. 

 

1. Understand business objectives

 

First off, you need to define your business objectives clearly. What do you do, and what do you want to achieve with your product?

 

The next thing you need to do is focus on what your business’s stakeholders want from the audit. Maybe there’s a feature with many user errors, and they want to lower the error rate significantly. 

 

Maybe there’s an overarching objective you want to get from the product, like breaking into a particular location or appealing to a specific demographic. 

 

2. Know the target audience

 

You must also understand what kind of users you’re designing for and their needs. Let’s say that your target audience is the elderly demographic. Then, you need to have a user-friendly UX design. You should also have a bigger font size and clear and straightforward instructions. 

 

Meanwhile, if you’re targeting tech-savvy millennials or Gen Zs, you might consider using more advanced features and looking for sleeker designs that appeal to this demographic. 

 

3. Analyzing the data

 

Another way to help you understand user behaviors better is by looking at your product’s analytics. Google Analytics allows you to track the data and metrics of your users on your site or app. 

 

It lets you see how well your product performs and its quantitative data. Some of its basic features include time spent on pages, user traffic, bounce rate, and tracking page views. 

 

Aside from Google Analytics, you can also utilize heat maps to help you track the interactions you have with users. Heat maps allow you to follow navigational patterns to easily track clicking habits, mouse movements, and user scrolls on the page. Popular heat mapping services that you can use include Clicktale, Hotjar, and Mourflow. 

 

4. Conduct heuristic analysis

 

The next thing is to analyze and test the product or site yourself. You want to check whether or not it’s user-friendly. You can do this by testing for usability. Try to put yourself into the user’s shoes to look for challenging areas. You might also consider other essential aspects, like exploring the product and finding usability issues. 

 

To cover all usability areas, you need to conduct a heuristic analysis. According to Jacob Nielson, there are ten usability heuristics: 

  • System status’ visibility
  • Matching between the real world and the system
  • User control and freedom
  • Consistency and standards
  • Prevention of errors
  • Recognition instead of recall
  • Aesthetic and minimalist design
  • Allows users to recognize, detect, and eventually recover from errors
  • Documentation and help

 

5. Understand behavioral metrics

 

Conducting website and mobile analytics lets you gain insight into how users interact with a product. For site audits, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to help you determine who’s visiting your site and how they interact with it. 

 

Studying this data gives you quantitative data about conversion, abandonment, user flows, etc. This lets you understand how well a product meets the user’s needs. Make sure you look at these data extensively to look for trends quickly. 

 

6. Compile findings and make recommendations

 

A UX audit usually ends by collecting findings and making necessary recommendations for the client and a bigger team. As soon as all of the data from different steps have been collected, it should be analyzed for insights into how well the product is being used and where users run into difficulties. 

 

This data should then be condensed into a document that clearly and concisely conveys its findings. It would help if you also gave your customers actionable recommendations based on your findings. Ideally, you must be clear on how every recommendation needs to be implemented and what you need to do to meet your business’ and users’ objectives. 

 

Conclusion

 

So there you have it. Doing a UX audit may seem daunting and vague at times. Also, keep in mind that all audits are different. It would be best if you had flexibility in creating your process and how you think it best fits your needs. 

 

As long as you can identify the issues in your users’ eyes and provide them with actionable solutions, you can quickly close the gap between the end user and the product. Good luck!