How A UX Audit Can Help To Avoid Redesign Pitfalls
The main objectives of any company providing digital products and services are to raise conversion rates, revenue, customer engagement, user satisfaction, retention, and brand loyalty while lowering churn, uninstalls, bounce rate, and support requests.
Through searches, social media, recommendations, media articles, or marketing initiatives, potential customers find your website or app. They take a glance at the website, some users may download the app, check out the features, and use the service for a while before completely giving up on it.
In other cases, you can have a product that originally drew certain customers. However, there is no increase in their utilization or number. Additionally, users are using your app or website less frequently or leaving it altogether. Even if you spend more on marketing initiatives, your revenue doesn't increase.
The bad user experience of your app or website may be one of the main causes of such situations.
The stakeholders may be aware of the performance bottlenecks of the product, but they often lack clarity on what has to be changed, how to change it, and when to change it. This is where a qualified UX audit can save the day.
Let's examine the UX audit in greater detail.
What is a UX Audit?
A User Experience Audit (UX Audit) identifies problematic aspects of a digital product, demonstrating which features are frustrating users and impeding conversions. Similar to financial audits, a UX audit makes recommendations for changes based on heuristics, in this case, user-centric enhancements, after expanding on the current scenario. A UX audit should ultimately show you how to increase conversions by making it simpler for users to accomplish their objectives with an app or website user experience audit.
This article aims to explain the fundamentals of UX audit and better comprehend the advantages of UX audit.
Redesign vs UX Audit: What to Start first?
Redesigning a product may not always bring positive results due to negligence of the root causes. Conducting an app or website UX audit is essential to understanding user pain points and creating a positive customer experience. It is important to get advice from UX professionals to get reliable answers and understand cultural factors in design.
UX audit is not only about asking your users about the problems, it's a complex process that involves several stages. If you decide to conduct a UX audit on your own, be ready to detach yourself from all your business processes and devote much time to the analysis of data. In some cases, less significant changes will save your business, and you’ll not have to hire a redesign team.
In any case, you might end up redesigning a website or an app. However, your approach should adhere to a similar set of phases and cover a comparable range of queries and issues no matter what you're redesigning.
Why do clients or stakeholders want to perform a redesign is the first question a UX designer should ask them.
There are numerous good reasons to perform a redesign.
These can include :
- The website seems outdated.
- There is a requirement to apply new branding.
- The advanced technologies made the site appear outdated.
- The site's information architecture is disorganised, and several links are broken.
- There is no cohesive organization and the user experience is confused.
- Analytics reveal that users struggle to complete their tasks and the reasons why they leave quickly.
The first two reasons on the list could only call for visual updates, but the remaining reasons call for significant UX changes.
Sometimes a customer or stakeholder will ask for a complete UX redesign only because they are bored of staring at the user interface of their product all day. This may cause a customer to concentrate on the negative aspects of their product's user interface. However, users may view the UI's familiarity as a plus in a different way.
Sometimes the clients or stakeholders understand the need to make the change but don’t understand where exactly to implement the changes. This could entail talking to your client about additional choices, such as a visuals refresh or minor UX changes.
UX Audit Guide : Step by Step
The steps involved in a UX audit can vary depending on the project's constraints. Generally, a UX audit includes examining the product's complexity, scope of work, and goals. This can scale up or down depending on the budget and timeline. Ultimately, the goal is similar and the focus is on the product's usability.
We will look into the common steps followed in the audit process:
1. Understanding business goals
Understanding the product and the organization's business objectives is essential for conducting a UX audit. Surveys and interviews with key individuals such as product managers, developers, etc. can provide insights into the product's positives and drawbacks which can lead to the establishment of steps to improve product and business growth. The website UX audit helps to define specifics of the organization's set goals, for example, increasing sales for a specific product, across the business, or in-store.
2. Understand the users
User personas are created to better understand users. Organizations may have gathered insights on their customers to develop their personas, by conducting interviews with selected users to collect feedback on the product.
3. Understand the user’s objectives
Users' objectives must be transformed into a user flow to define objectives and steps that should be taken to achieve them. This process should identify areas where users may have difficulty or get stuck. User goals should be gathered from stakeholder interviews, user surveys and/or user interviews.
4. Analytics
Most organizations use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Woopra to quantify data related to product usage. To further understand user behavior, it is recommended to use additional tools like heat mapping and other analytics tools. This data can be used to track and make changes to the product over time.
5. Usability heuristics
Usability heuristics are a practical way to solve problems or make decisions in UX design. Heuristic evaluation uses Nielsen's ten usability heuristics to measure the usability of user interfaces and report any usability issues that have been missed by the design team.
6. Systematize findings and give recommendations
The audit data should be compiled into a report “UX Audit Report” that contains practical suggestions to provide solutions to identified issues. Each recommendation should have a clear implementation plan to meet business and user goals. Presentation of findings and recommendations should be done through visual aids such as site maps, wireframes, or prototypes. Avoiding overly critical recommendations should also be considered.
Benefits of UX Audit
1. You'll redesign your product based on solid data not, guessing
During UX Audit, we gather data to get more useful insights about the product. This keeps us away from guessing as we consider business/user objectives, conversion metrics, customer care data, sales data, traffic/engagement, UX standards, usability heuristics, mental modelling, and wire-framing.
2. You'll move in the right direction and gain a new product perspective
You may start to miss certain bugs or logic flaws if you work on a product for too long. Gaining a fresh perspective from an experienced UX expert can help you pick up these flaws.
At TECHVED, we have a team of UX experts to inspect flaws in the present user experience design to achieve the greatest level of service quality. This is what we undertake to provide you with a comprehensive view of your product's state. Check out the website and get a Free UX Audit to find more.
3. You'll compare your product with competitive solutions
Well-conducted competition analysis allows you to define key success factors and compare strengths and weaknesses to stand out and provide unique value. Additionally, benchmark analysis can help introduce new, fresh functions by exploring approaches used in different industries.
4. You'll learn how your users behave and get to know them better
During a UX Audit, qualitative data is gathered through a product cognitive walkthrough and quantitative data is gathered through tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar. This data will allow the user to understand if their product is intuitive, and the ways users engage with their product.
5. You'll save money on development and increase your profits
UX Audit products provide a report containing a UX improvement road-map and suggestions that help you save money and increase profits. This plan allows you to make necessary changes, improve value proposition and communication, eliminate purchase path distractions, streamline on-boarding and make products more intuitive. This will result in a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS), lower churn rate and more referrals.
Conclusion
A UX audit takes a major commitment of time and human resources, if done internally, and if professional UX auditors are hired. However, the advantages of an established website or app are apparent, especially if conversions are stagnant or slowly increasing and the users' perspective is not taken into account while making improvements to the product. You may make major, data-driven changes to an application and improve user satisfaction and ROI by conducting a UX audit.
With the help of a professional UX audit from UI UX design company, you can identify problems that need to be fixed and learn about fresh approaches to boost ROI. But it is important to follow up. Nothing will change if you don't make the advised modifications. Do you believe that your product needs adjustments?
At TECHVED, we can help you to conduct a UX Audit and Product Redesign as we have a team with extensive knowledge of UX review. We provide thorough reports for business optimization keeping user behaviour in mind. Check our website www.techved.com and get a Free UX Audit Now! Connect with us on [email protected]
FAQs
What is a UX design audit?
A UX design audit is an evaluation of a product or service's user experience which looks at the user interface, navigation, information architecture and more. The purpose of the audit is to identify areas to improve and optimize the user experience. A UX Audit provides insights and recommendations on how to increase conversions by making the website or app easier to use.
What are the 4 stages of UX?
The four stages of UX (User Experience) audit are as follows:
1. Research - This stage involves gathering data about users, understanding their needs and figuring out how to solve the problem. It includes user interviews, surveys, usability testing, and market analysis.
2. Design - This stage is about creating a design solution to solve the problem. It includes creating user flows, wireframing, prototyping, and user interface design.
3. Development - This stage is about translating the design solution into a tangible product. It includes coding, testing, and quality assurance.
4. Evaluation - This stage is about measuring how effective the product is in meeting user needs. It includes conducting user research, usability testing, and data.
Why to conduct a UX Audit ?
A UX audit process is designed to identify any usability issues, potential UI an UX design improvements and opportunities for innovation. It can help to identify points where the user experience design fails and how it can be improved. Conducting a UX audit can help to identify issues and opportunities early on in the design process, saving time and money on development and increasing user satisfaction. Additionally, it can provide valuable insights into how customers are interacting with the product and what their needs are.
What is the difference between UX Audit and UX Redesign ?
UX Audit is the process of analyzing and evaluating a product’s current user experience. It looks at all aspects of the user experience, including usability, UX content audit, visual design, and how users interact with and find value in a product. UX UI Audit is used to identify any weak points or gaps in the current user experience.
UX Redesign is the process of taking an existing product and redesigning it to improve the user experience. It involves making changes to the product’s visual design, usability, content, and the overall user experience. The goal of UX redesign is to create a product that is more intuitive, user-friendly, and provides a better user experience for the target audience.
