Transform Your Business with a UX Audit: Boost Engagement, Conversions, and Satisfaction

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Introduction

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Source: Pepper Square

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In the current digital era, user experience (UX) is everything. A good user experience (UX) may make or break a potential customer's decision to interact with your business, as your website or app is frequently their initial point of contact. How can you, however, make sure your digital product offers the greatest user experience? The UX/UI audit is a thorough assessment that helps create a more user-centric experience by pinpointing areas that need improvement.

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Through this blog we will explore the value of UX audits and the advantages they provide for companies of all kinds and sectors. We will also discuss UX audits' return on investment (ROI) and show how a well-planned audit may result in observable business growth.

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What Is a UX Audit

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But first, what exactly is a UX audit? As we talked about it a little in the introduction, usability audit is an inspection one conducts to identify potential issues that may hamper the user experience on a product. 

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After a well audit is conducted a final UX report is delivered to work upon the imperfections of the website or the app. A UX is not just an activity but rather a combination of different ones.  In the next section let us explore what activities are involved in the UX audit process.

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When To Do a UX Audit

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These are the main times when UX audits are helpful for most businesses:

• In the event that sales, conversions, or user engagement are slowing down, UX audits can assist you in identifying the "leaks" in your most crucial key performance indicators (KPIs).
• While getting ready to introduce a minimum viable product (MVP): UX audits assist you in identifying any problems in advance, ensuring a flawless launch.
• Anytime an established product needs a general health check: Even in cases where your software is operating smoothly, UX audits might reveal user demands and pain spots.
• When considering migrating or rebuilding an app. To catch up with the trend or to enhance user experience one can take a UX audit as the starting block for their project.

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How Much Does a UX Audit Cost?

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There is no defined answer for this, it heavily depends on the scope and complexity of the audit, the duration of the UX audit, and who you are working with (it may be an agency or an individual freelancer).

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According to Koru UX ”Depending on the scope and scale of the product, a basic audit exercise can cost between $ 5k to $ 15k, which will cover a single product, multiple workflows using an informal approach.” 

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Freelancers may charge a bit less than that, approx $ 1k to $ 5k, with this you can get a checklist with detailed explanation on where the UX can be improved.

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Key Components of a UX Audit

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These components are necessary to determine the scope of a UX audit and assess the quality of user experience.

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Source: Adamfard

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Defined Business Goals

First and foremost business goals need to be well-defined in order to establish a well structured UX audit. With clear objectives you will know where to start, what matters, what tools do we need, and how to allocate available resources.

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Understanding the Users

Your end goal is to ensure user satisfaction. For this we need to understand a bit more about our users and what they are doing on our platform.

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Gather User Data

If you are working on an already existing product available in the market then it becomes necessary as well as easy to check user patterns over your product. There are various tools like- Google Analytics, Hotjar, Maze, and so on that will help you cover your basic and advanced level of user data collection.

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Source: Hotjar

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Build User Personas

Another key factor is having a user persona. Now what exactly is this? A user persona can be considered as a mock bio data of your potential user of the product. This can be created by doing user surveys or even by gathering data virtually.

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Source: IteratorsHQ

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Usability Testing

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Usability testing's primary objective is to assist you in comprehending how actual users interact with a product. The ability to remedy an issue without expending a lot of time or money is provided by testing at the appropriate time. A usability test does that.

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Every milestone or step you take can help you recognize difficulties, and it can help you solve them immediately. In the end, this aids in creating a user-friendly, optimised version of the product.

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According to Nielsen Norman Group one needs to have at least 5 interviews per feature, beyond that will give you diminishing returns.

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Source: NN Group

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Heuristic Evaluation

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More concretely, a heuristic evaluation in the context of a UX audit is having a group of designers assess your product while keeping an eye out for any problems with heuristics. Nielsen's usability heuristics are the most widely used set of heuristics by professionals. 

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These are listed in the following order:

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Source: IDF

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To read about them in detail, you can go through this article.

User Surveys and Interviews

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As designers we can be pretty biassed towards our product which can lead to dissatisfaction among the users. To counter this it is always good to directly reach out to our end users and know their views on the product. 

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These interviews and surveys help product researchers understand what is the demand in the market, how well is our product performing, and what are the pain points of our users. Getting directly in touch with the users helps researchers present a well defined report that can be used by the designers in formulating new functions or revamping the user interface of the product.

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If you want to know more about user interviews, here’s a detailed video on how to conduct user interviews by CareerFoundary.

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Output of a UX Audit

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The project description and the primary objectives of the UX audit are typically included in the report along with the conclusions of the UX audit. It contains:

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• Project details and the goals of the study
• The report includes quantitative data examined during the UX audit as well as information on user behaviour. 
• Competitive analysis, user interviews, testing data, customer journey mapping, specifics of A/B tests, and heuristic evaluation are a few possible inclusions.comprehensive description of the test results, emphasising the primary issues and possible areas for development.
• Prioritise ideas and recommendations that could enhance usability and increase return on investment.

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ROI of UX Audit: Why Your Business Needs It

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Businesses can gain a great deal from investing in a UX audit. Some businesses might be hesitant due to perceived costs. However, the ROI associated with UX audits is undeniable. The following are some of the main benefits:

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Source: Pepper Square

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Enhanced User Engagement

When a user experience is well-designed, users are more likely to stay interested and return. Usability flaws can be found and fixed via a UX audit, which can greatly increase user engagement metrics.

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Increased Conversion Rates

Higher conversion rates are the result of a smooth user experience. A user experience audit can assist you in optimising your digital product to turn more people into users or customers, regardless of your goal of increasing sales, signups, or downloads.

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Boosted Customer Satisfaction

Contented customers stick around. A UX audit can greatly increase client satisfaction and loyalty by guaranteeing a favourable UX. Positive word-of-mouth advertising and brand advocacy may result from this.

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Reduced Development Cost

It is significantly less expensive to address usability problems early in the development process than to address them afterwards. You may find such issues and take action against them before they become expensive bugs by doing a UX audit.

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Increase Brand Reputation

A website or app that is easy to use and intuitive for users reflects well on your brand. You may show your clients that you appreciate their time and care about their experience by giving user experience (UX) first priority.

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Competitive Advantage

Additionally, UX audits assist you in making comparisons with comparable goods and services and advise you of the reasons why they outperform you. It is possible to have a deeper understanding of how these comparisons might help your organisation by examining case studies and examples.

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By implementing benchmark analysis, you may also ascertain the factors that influence clients to select your rival.

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UX Audit Tools That You Can Try

Wondering what tools can be resourceful for conducting UX audit? Here’s a list of well known UX audit tools that most of the players in the industry use to improve their user experience.

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Maze

To evaluate ideas before developing them, UX and product researchers can utilise Maze to distribute surveys to user persona groups and do wireframe and usability tests. The application can be used by UX auditors to organise and oversee experiments. It can bifurcate the the flow into smaller sections, generate heat maps, and a full fledged health report

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Know more about Maze

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Hotjar

Hotjar is a well-liked solution for e-commerce businesses and other prominent consumer websites. Heatmaps, session recordings, and user sentiment surveys are some of the best features. 

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Know more about Hotjar

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Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytical tool offering reports, customised dashboards, user segmentation, and alerts for major issues.

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Know more about Mixpanel

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Lookback

Lookback is another great tool used by UX researchers which can help them collaborate with teams, take timed notes, observe interviews virtually, capture screen touch, analyse user behaviour and so more.

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Know more about Lookback

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Google Analytics

The most often used free website analytics tool is Google Analytics. It can help you comprehend both the amount of traffic to your website and the activities that users take there. Find problems with your funnels and key pages.

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Know more about Google Analytics

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Conclusion

User experience must now be prioritised in order to remain competitive in today's market. An effective approach for pinpointing opportunities for development and producing a digital product that genuinely connects with your target market is a UX audit. 

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You can get a multitude of advantages by investing in a UX audit and strategically putting the recommendations into practice, from improved brand reputation and devoted customers to higher conversion rates and lower expenses. Keep in mind that improving user experience is an investment in your company's future. Even though a UX audit might seem a bit costly, one can’t simply neglect the ROI it can bring on to the table.

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Need someone to do a UX audit service for you and build cool product? We at Alien Design are here to help you out! 

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