When Salesforce introduced a new Lightning UI, customers faced a backlash due to its excessive white space, which led to lesser customer adoption. So, the company decided to retain some parts of the previous user experience and started its development phase. The solution now seems simple, but it was only possible through deep product analysis. The Salesforce team came up with an actionable solution only because of the UX audit, which led to faster adoption of Lighting UI. As a result, the company gained 6 million active monthly users.
This decade has witnessed a lot of transitions in the IT sector, shaking off many drawbacks and continuing evolution. To be honest, there has been a tremendous effort to add technical functionalities to the websites, but comparatively less effort is being made to reduce their complexity. The solution to all these problems is a User Experience Audit.
This blog covers all the problems your users experience while interacting with and navigating your website. As a result, you can find the pain points and improve the checkout process, navigation, search functions, product page layout, mobile UX, and much more. But how to perform a UX audit and how does it enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty? This article will enlighten you on these same topics.
What is a UX Audit?
A User Experience Audit (UX Audit) identifies areas of improvement within a digital product, pinpointing aspects of a website or app that may be causing user frustration and restricting conversions. Similar to financial audits, a UX audit employs practical methods to identify the current state of your website and recommend user-centric solutions. The primary goal of a UX audit is to provide insights on how to enhance conversions by simplifying user interactions within your site or application.
While a UX audit may not directly resolve all issues, it can address fundamental questions such as:
- Where do users struggle with navigation?
- What does user behavior data reveal about their needs?
- What changes could potentially improve website performance?
For instance, an e-commerce store UX audit might reveal information gaps about product delivery, limited payment options, or a slow-loading checkout page, all contributing to a higher shopping cart abandonment rate.
A UX audit involves an expert assessment of usability and user experience, examining and rating user journeys to discover areas for improvement. This may include understanding the design's value through team participation, establishing metrics for future adjustments, insights into existing user behavior, and hypotheses about its future use.
How does a UX Audit work?
Once you have the basics, you can start the UX audit process. From a bird's-eye view, a UX audit mainly consists of five main steps: gathering materials and metrics, validating results, organizing data, reviewing trends and tendencies, reporting all findings, and then creating evidence and document-based recommendations.
Let’s learn more about these five stages:
1. Metrics and Materials Gathering
Heuristic Product Evaluation
A cognitive walkthrough to see products from the viewpoint of the customer, focus on achieving user goals and identify potential obstacles.
Website and Mobile Analytics:
Utilize analytics tools for both qualitative and quantitative data. Basic functions in Google Analytics can cover traffic sources and trends, while advanced tools can provide heat maps and churn rates.
Conversion Rates or Sales Figures:
If you have an e-commerce store, measure sales or download figures to understand user interactions. For instance, track which blog posts lead to downloads, offering insights into content effectiveness.
Stakeholder Interviews or User Surveys:
Engage with internal stakeholders, such as product owners and developers, and seek insights into the product plan, requirements, and ongoing development challenges.
2. Validating Gathered Results
All the data and information gathered in the initial step can be meticulously tracked on a worksheet, facilitating systematic aggregation. To enhance collaboration, upload this spreadsheet to the cloud, transforming it into a dynamic, collaborative document within your audit team. Here, questions and ideas can be seamlessly recorded alongside relevant metrics, encouraging a holistic and interactive approach.
3. Look for Trends and Tendencies
The junction where data transforms into insights can be nerve-wracking. There are essential methodologies that exist to make sense of audit data and the information gathered. Techniques like data mining, card sorting, and the concept of insight incubation prove invaluable in identifying complexities and deriving meaningful interpretations from UX audits.
4. Reporting of Audit Findings
After mining data for insights, the next phase involves developing hypotheses about the application's user experience status and seeking to understand why users behave as they do, diverging from stakeholders' goals. This process entails comparing the acquired insights against four fundamental keystones of successful products
- Evaluating the relevance by addressing user pain points and discerning potential disconnections between user expectations and reality.
- Assessing the clarity and persuasiveness of the value proposition.
- Scrutinizing the usability by identifying points of ambiguity or uncertainty in the product interface and ensuring intuitive user understanding.
- Analyzing the visibility, relevance, and incentivization effectiveness of calls to action.
This comprehensive evaluation framework will serve as a strategic guide for refining the user experience.
5. Giving Recommendations
The final process of the UX audit involves creating data-driven recommendations for improvements. The emphasis should be on highlighting the positive points, expressing any issues practically, and providing specific details. To support your recommendations, include examples such as rearranging forms based on click-through rate, removing images from the dropdown menu, etc.
Suggested Read
KOTC: An Evolution in Fantasy Gaming
View Blog
Enhancing Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
On top of giving you a business advantage, a UX audit can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty toward your brand. Let’s find out how.
1. Gives a Fresh Perspective from the eyes of your Customers
Getting in the customer’s shoes gives you insights into what problems customers are facing and if you are using any business jargon, which can lead to further confusion for the users. When your brand is too focused on selling your product, you might overlook basic bugs or logical flaws just because you are too familiar with it. A UX audit ensures that you are communicating your USPs to even new customers, which makes them loyal to your brand. A simple audit can give you a fresh perspective, and customers can experience a better and uninterrupted version of your website or apps.
2. Positive Implementation can Promote App Usage
A meticulous analysis allows you to identify key factors and how to position yourself as an industry leader. It reveals practical reasons why your application is lagging. Which, in turn, allows you to rectify these flaws. By studying these insights, you can distinguish your product and improve your customer advantage by focusing on the user experience. The audit's positive influence will allow customers to recommend apps to their peers and increase installations.
3. Align your Business to Customer Needs
Evaluating how your product aligns with customer goals allows you to identify errors, assess user compliance, and finally achieve customer satisfaction. The quantitative data gathered through acquisition channels and web traffic can be used for session recordings, understanding heat maps, and determining customer behavior. This comprehensive analysis aligns your business expectations with the needs of your customers and, in turn, enhances long-term trust and satisfaction for your users.
4. Happy Browsing on Smartphones!
With the widespread use of smartphones, you must focus on enhancing the user experience for both mobile applications and browsers. As per recent research, it is evident that 70% of Indian adults now own and use smartphones, and this number is much greater in other countries, as you can see in the chart below.
To improve user engagement on smartphones, an audit plays a vital role in determining device preferences, time duration, and browser use. This gives a better insight into what will work and what's not working on your current website. A thorough assessment can identify touch-friendly interactions, mobile navigation settings, responsive designs, and confusing elements and recommend changes to make them more enjoyable and usable at the same time. This mobile optimization goes a long way in increasing user interaction, promoting mobile traffic, and multiplying app downloads and user satisfaction.
5. Identify Customer’s Pain Points
Not the actual body pain but the mental stress that customers face while navigating to another page, slow website load time, and confusing checkout process, which can lead to frustration. To target these user pain points, you can utilize a comprehensive UX audit, identify major and minor setbacks, and turn this frustration into user satisfaction. This approach has worked wonders for many leading companies and has proven to gain loyal customers over many years.
Suggested Read
Pronto: An Inventive Approach to Redefine Dating in India
View Blog
Elevating Your Digital Presence with Expert UX Auditing
Take a user-centric approach and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty through UX audits. This process not only promotes your business organically, it improves the conversion rate, stands you out from the competition, and most importantly, builds trust between you and your customers. Next time a customer is browsing your website, they will witness a satisfying user experience; they will browse through your product catalog and make a purchase, and who knows maybe they’ll recommend your products to their friends, just because their user experience was so satisfying.
UX Audits are pivotal in bridging the gap between user expectations and digital experience, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. At SoluteLabs, we pride ourselves on our expertise in UI/UX design services. Our dedicated approach not only identifies areas for improvement but also implements strategic solutions that align with your business objectives, ensuring a user experience that resonates with your audience and fosters long-term loyalty.
