When looking at your website and where conversions are coming from it (or lack thereof), you may think some aspects need to be changed to create a better customer journey. It’s easy to start A/B testing a million different ideas, but how do you know if what you’re testing matters, needs to be tested, or will make a difference? That’s where a UX, or a User Experience, audit comes in.
UX Audits can save a lot of time with deciding your digital strategy, before jumping into just making changes by giving you a place to start.
If you have found yourself asking any of these questions, consider a UX audit:
- Why are visitors not converting?
- Why aren’t people signing up for our product?
- What’s stopping free accounts from converting to paid customers?
- Where are users getting stuck?
- Where are visitors not converting?
- Where or why are they dropping off?
- What’s working and what isn’t?
- Why is customer satisfaction low?
These are the questions that come up when you notice that something is wrong. Like that nagging feeling that perks up when you know you forgot something. The difficulty is twofold. First, you may not know where to start to make the most of your time, and there are so many options of things you can test or improve. Next, it is easy to be “too close to your product” and increasingly difficult to step outside the business and look at the site from a fresh perspective.
But, you must solve whatever issues have prompted those questions because a clear customer journey turns visitors into customers. A UX audit helps remove problems that may hinder your visitors’ journey. It eliminates current user pain points and focuses efforts on users’ goals and expectations. Effectively, the UX audit is an evaluation of the intersection of user needs and your business goals.
Okay, but why?
Though you know there is a problem, you may not be sure if it is worth the time and investment, but overall a UX audit has some far-reaching benefits that will help improve the health of your business. A UX audit is an independent yet deeply experienced analysis of where a site could be causing frustration for users.
By applying heuristic analysis and prioritizing primary areas for improvement. This culminates in a customized checklist of what should be addressed and when to address it, ultimately creating a better customer journey on your site.
Not only does a clearer and more enjoyable customer journey increase conversions and sales, but it also increases retention and user engagement. This leads to happier customers, improved brand perception, lower support calls, and a lower cost for acquisition.
People will be able to naturally navigate your website without issue, which will make them want to return. Just because your brand or product is unique doesn’t mean you need to reinvent how to run your website. The average person visits dozens of websites per day, so consistency in their experience is better for your business than trying to reinvent the wheel and make them figure things out.
If you need speed, hire a third party. UX Audits are very time-consuming, and you likely don’t have the bandwidth to do it internally. Also, third parties are objective and unbiased, which is essential as we noted above. Every dollar invested in UX brings $2 to $100 in return or an ROI of up to 9,900%.
Whether you are a product owner with a digital product, wanting to find out why it is not converting and fixing the problems with key user flows, or a founder wanting to catch obvious improvements before moving their prototype to development, a UX audit is something you should consider. The same goes for the scenarios below:
- Product managers needing an external and unbiased perspective to identify quick wins.
- Investors who want to support their portfolio companies with incremental UX changes.
- Product teams wanting to benchmark their UX to see how they compare with themselves or others over time.
How does a UX audit work?
This process starts, for Mobile1st, with a kickoff call to capture additional context, key metrics, and other background information on the site, product, and audience. Next is the deep-dive analysis of your site and the customer journey externally, followed by a competitor analysis to identify UX/UI patterns that reduce friction for the use.
With this complete, all the items that stand out are benchmarked against industry best practices with source references. During the process, an auditor will look at all primary components of your site. For example, with an eCommerce site, Mobile1st analyzes:
- Homepage
- Navigation
- Search
- Product lists & filtering
- Product details pages
- Checkout process
- Mobile experience for all areas listed above
What do I get if I do an audit?
As a client, there’s not much you have to do after the kickoff conversation. You’ve got enough going on and Mobile1st is here to save you time (and make your site convert more). While we’re going through 100+ items to potentially address, and that may seem like a lot to prioritize, we really focus on making a UX Audit simple to tackle, focusing on what has the highest impact.
It’s easy to get a list of 100 things you should do to your site. That’s not helpful. It’s the teasing out which of those items will have the highest impact and should happen first. Mobile1st handles that for you.
Mobile1st groups things into three categories to make it easy for prioritization:
- Undeniable wins:
Things proven to have a positive impact on thousands of websites, with no risk of rolling these items out. - Testing Opportunities:
A shortlist of 5 core testing opportunities will surface based on where your most valuable traffic is to get started with A/B testing. (Dozens of test ideas end up in the backlog during a UX audit, but we prioritize the top of the top ideas) - Larger Projects:
A shortlist of long-term areas of focus that can’t be addressed with just an A/B test.
This all creates a 6–9-month roadmap of conversion optimization strategy for your business.
- Why you should conduct UX Audits - August 24, 2021