- Diana Gabor, UX/UI Designer at BoatyardX
It’s common knowledge that user experience is a make-or-break factor for any digital product, regardless of industry or sector. Proud of your product but sense it hasn’t quite hit its stride? UX audits are an essential tool to ensure it hits its full potential.
UX audits are just one of the ways to assess your product. Other valuable methods include user testing, interviews, and surveys, each offering unique insights to help you refine and optimise the user experience. In this article we’re going to focus on UX audits, exploring how they can be leveraged so you can start making informed, data-driven decisions.
UX audit, what is it?
A UX audit serves as a rapid quality check for your digital product’s experience. Its primary goal is to find out how well the product is performing against desired goals, identify weaknesses and suggest actionable follow‐up activities to improve user experience.
Think of it like conducting a thorough building inspection before starting a renovation project, it involves checking every nook and cranny, identifying potential problems, and proposing upgrades to ensure safety and comfort. And just as a renovation can breathe new life into a building, addressing the findings from a UX audit can breathe new life into your product, within the constraints of your budget, enhancing its appeal and usability for the customers.
What can an UX audit do for you?
Here are some essential outcomes of UX auditing you shouldn’t miss:
1. Save on development costs, de-risk delivery
Avoid wasting resources by accurately identifying problems before implementing solutions.
2. Get an unbiased perspective about your customers
Find out why your product fails to meet customers expectations. Get solid, data-driven insights into their behaviour, eliminating the need for guesswork.
3. Increased retention rates
A UX audit gives you a clear product roadmap on how to improve your user experience-from the first visit and straight into retention.
What’s inside a UX audit and what will you get?
Here’s a breakdown of what can be included in an UX audits, with some examples from our own website to show you how it works:
📊 Study of analytics
This involves analysing user behaviour using tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics. For our website, we utilised Hotjar to monitor tracking where users click, which pages they visit most, and where they might be dropping off.
📱 Usability Evaluation
This is all about assessing the product against established guidelines such as Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics and Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles for Good Design. During our own audit we took note of areas where the design could be more intuitive. For instance, we checked if all buttons have clear labels and provided clear feedback when clicked.
⏳ Performance Evaluation
These evaluations focus on technical aspects like page load times and overall speed. Using Google Lighthouse, we ran a performance audit on our website. We measured various metrics to form a clear picture of how each one of our pages performs across devices.
👁️ Accessibility Evaluation
Accessibility evaluations focus on ensuring that the product can be used by people with disabilities. This involves checking compliance with standards like WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) or ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). We conduct accessibility evaluations using tools that allow us to identify issues such as color contrast, alt text for images, and keyboard navigation.
⚖️ Benchmark against industry best practices
This involves comparing the product’s features and performance against leading standards and practices within the industry. This helps ensure that benchmarks set by the industry leaders are not only met but exceeded.
🧩 Tailored recommendations
The audit also includes personalised advice tailored to address the previously identified issues unique to your product. The recommendations provided are not generic solutions but rather strategic, actionable insights designed specifically for your product’s unique context and audience.
All the information and insights gathered during the UX audit will be compiled into a final report. With this report, you’ll have a clear roadmap for elevating your product’s user experience. In addition, the report will include KPIs that you can use to measure the success of your post-audit improvements, such as user retention rates, lower bounce rates, or higher conversion rates.
How can BoatyardX’s expert eye enhance your product?
We understand that every product is unique, and so are its challenges. Our UX audits are customised to address the specific needs of your product. Our team of experienced designers, skilled in UX auditing, will tailor a bespoke audit to tackle the specific challenges your product faces. We don’t just identify problems; we provide practical, actionable solutions that lead to immediate improvements.
Let us cast our expert eye on your product, and together, we can elevate its user experience to new heights. Reach out at letsgettowork@boatyardx.com, and let’s start transforming your product today.
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