People are clicking on your Google Ads. But when they come to your website, they either find the items they like, put them in the cart and then abandon the cart or they bounce off to another website in as little as 5 seconds. How do you figure out what is going wrong with your ecommerce website design or your application?
Is it because the website is slow to load? Or because the navigation is too confusing? With so many elements on your site, it’s often confusing to find out what to work on. That’s where a UX audit can help you. Let’s go on to understand more about it.
What is a UX audit and when do you need to conduct one?
A UX audit is a process where a website or an application’s interface is evaluated to find problematic areas that make users abandon their journey and leave. A UX audit’s main goal is not to directly solve all the problems concerning your website or application but to answer questions such as: “Which steps are customers finding difficult while navigating the app?” “Do they face any difficulty understanding the functions?” “Is speed an issue?”
These problems, if solved, can help improve the user experience and increase conversion rates. A UX audit is mostly conducted when you redesign your website or application or wish to implement a new functionality or while making a new product. That said, it can be conducted at any stage to improve your product and remove any obstacles in the user’s journey.
Steps to conducting an effective UX Audit
1. Know your audience and your product
You must first understand the product goals you wish to achieve and then accordingly set up the UX audit objectives and expectations. For example, if your ultimate goal is to increase the conversion rate, you might want to assess the checkout process. Which parts are causing misunderstanding? Are the payment options too few? Is the payment portal unreliable? Are the delivery instructions not clear?
Knowing your audience is of paramount importance as well because they’ll be the people using your product. Understanding their behavior, demographics, user flows, and the steps they take to perform an action will build up a solid foundation. You can gain this information by gathering existing data, conducting stakeholder interviews and end user interviews.
2. Use different metrics and collect insights
Just measuring your website traffic isn’t enough. Once you have defined your core problem, you should collect all the different metrics that aid in giving you valuable insights related to that. For example, if your problem is poor conversion rate, the different metrics to be analyzed are traffic flows and trends over time, conversion and abandonment hotspots, what users do before and after they visit your site and so on.
Next, usability testing is done to detect design flaws, areas that affect the overall performance and functions that cause misunderstanding. Several such testing rounds are carried out to accurately come up with the products' problematic areas.
3. Organize and analyze the data
Once the data has been gathered, compile it into a spreadsheet or a medium that helps everyone stay in the loop and where the entire team can collaborate, record questions and ideas alongside relevant metrics. Some companies conduct a screen-by-screen analysis of their product which involves mapping out the entire user flow. This gives a clear picture of all the different pages and actions that users take. All of this is then analyzed and the major usability issues are pointed out.
4. Report the findings and recommend improvements
At the final stage, the findings are reviewed and presented along with the suggested improvements that need to take place, both in the short term and the long term. These suggestions could be across different fronts such as visual design, responsiveness, message clarity and accessibility.
These recommendations should first go through A/B testing. You can use Ruttl to make real-time edits and leave comments on websites. You can also check how two different versions of a website would look without coding knowledge. Inviting your team members, managers or clients to review your website and suggest changes is also possible. All of this will make your entire process easier and faster.
In your final report, you can organize all these findings and suggestions into different criteria like critical usability issues, A/B test and suggestions, quick wins, impact and challenges. Doing this will help you better identify the potential areas for improvement that could maximize your ROI.
Whether you’re a website design company or a brand that wants to conduct an in-depth UX Audit, try out ruttl.com for your A/B testing.
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