If you ever ask yourself why users don’t subscribe to your product, or why they don’t understand how to use it, or why, for example, users don’t complete their actions, then you’re likely to have missed a very important step in creating your product – user experience (UX) audit. In this article, we talk about everything concerning UX audit, so don’t miss reading it!
A user experience audit is an expert evaluation of how your potential clients interact with your website or application. A UX designer identifies interface flaws in the visual design and issues with UX logic based on the analysis and user behavior. Then they develop a plan to eliminate these issues and provide recommendations on how to solve them.
UX audit is not a magic wand that will help to cope with all problems in your site. That’s why this article will help you to understand what specific problems it solves and how it can help in your particular case.
UX is responsible for logic, clear navigation, and functional interface. No matter what the traffic is, there will be no-conversion growth if usability isn’t sufficiently designed.UX audit helps solve the problems such as:
The percentage of visiting websites from mobile devices increased significantly in recent years. Users are more likely to browse content and make purchases using their smartphones. Your site needs to be adaptive for mobile devices, as this is a huge zone of growth in the profit of your products. The problem of poor usability can be in poor mobile adaptability.
There is another variant of the problem related to adaptability: when more people visit the website through mobile devices than through the desktop. But the conversion on the site still higher on the site. UX audit solves all these aspects.
Low conversion is one of the main problems of any business, which brings great losses: low sales, high promotion costs, slow business development, and many other factors. The problem affects all business processes, so the final situation is aggravated at times. Solving this problem is one of the issues that UX audit solves.
The problem of a high bounce rate arises from the fact that the website doesn’t fulfill the function that it should do. When users don’t find what they are looking for on your site and as a result, you observe a staggeringly high bounce rate. It’s necessary to deal with this problem and improve performance so that visitors would definitely find something useful on your site for themselves. And the UX audit helps you with this problem.
This problem concerns e-commerce sites. Statistically, the shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers varies between 60% to 80%. This is very a high rate, which should be reduced because users don’t complete the purchase and leave the shopping cart at the last moment. This issue can be overcome by conducting UX audit too.
Сhurn rate is an indicator of customers who left the company’s website, unsubscribed from the communication channel or refused from services, which led to a drop in the revenue. This index is significant for the business because it influences the field of activity that makes it possible to identify losses in the competitiveness of the company’s offer. This is due to an implicit change in the quality of services, miscalculations per the needs of competitors. The influx of new customers must exceed the outflow for the company growing.
Now let’s figure out when it’s proper time to do UX audit and increase conversions and overall site performance.
If you’re sure that you have at least one problem from the points that we have discussed above, the problem with your site is probably in poor usability. You should fall back on the website UX audit in order to improve your performance site.
It often happens that a website unexpectedly begins to lose the ground in search engines, orders become smaller, conversion decreases. But you didn’t do anything that could result all these issues: advertising continues to work, product prices haven’t risen, quality of service has not worsened… Most likely the reason is in outdated website design. The problem is that the changes haven’t been made too long and you missed the moment when the resource ceased to be exciting and modern.
An outdated website design can hardly be popular with users. Visitors won’t give preference to the site if they understand that the site is not given due attention, and will not take the information posted on it seriously. Therefore, in this case, you should resort to the UX audit that will help identify the shortcomings of your design and a way to fix them.
If you get bad reviews or complaints from your users, then it’s worth seriously thinking what exactly your visitors do not understand in the site’s work, why they are leaving and what are they unsatisfied with? Proper UX audit will help to answer all these questions and give you tips to improve your poor usability.
If you have a high bounce rate, high cart abandonment rate, if you receive complaints about your site or you have an outdated design of your website this will most likely lead to a low conversion and a drop in your revenue. In this challenging task, a UX audit should help you, as it can determine exactly why your income is falling and understand how to eliminate this problem so as not to lose your existing customers and also attract new ones.
So what effect does audit have on your site and what are the benefits?
A high level of customer satisfaction is the primary and initial goal of every business in any field of activity. When you understand the essence of your problems and improve the performance of your site using UX audit, this should lead to an increased number of users on your website and greater involvement. Which will lead to greater profits in return. After eliminating issues, your site becomes more intuitive, easy to use, and it takes a minimum of time to make a key action on it.
Loyal customers don’t switch easily to another brand because of the lower prices. They would rather pay more to get the expected quality of the product they know and love. The better service you provide, the more often people return to the site and want to make more and more actions and purchases. It’s very important to retain and engage the customer. Loyal customers are emotionally attached to the company, they love the brand and are ready to buy these products and recommend them to friends.
Few consumers are really well versed in the quality of the products they purchase. People more often believe the characteristics or reviews stated in the advertisement. Making any purchase, buyers choose those brands that they have heard or read about somewhere. Familiar brand that is what most people prefer.
That is why a high level of product awareness provides the brand with an advantage over lesser-known products. The higher the brand awareness of your company, the more likely it is that the buyer will remember exactly about it at the time of choosing goods from one category. After the UX audit, in case of problems with the brand identity, it should be added, and then this site can be easily recognized even at a glance.
During the UX audit process, a UX designer identifies issues with the usability. There may be problems with a flaw, bad design, or poor functionality. There is some kind of obstacle in your site that prevents it from working one hundred percent. The main task of the audit is to find this problem and fix it so that the client has the opportunity to make purchases or perform actions on your website without any problems.
Thanks to user experience audit, the website is analyzed to determine what error your website specifically needs to correct in order for it to work properly and make a profit. Once this error is determined, you may need to redesign the website or to make the whole code audit. If you hire a team of professionals, they will make a complete list of those factors that need to be redesigned and corrected in order to remedy the poor functionality of your website. Audit professionals will share their invaluable experience and knowledge that can improve and correct the problem situation on your website.
Conducting audit, you make a great step to find out the tastes and preferences of your customers better. After all, you had problems, your clients didn’t perform the necessary action that is required and left to look for another better option. After receiving the inside information of website usability audit, review your views on customers, maybe you were targeting the wrong target audience, or some of your product or service has more interest than you expected. Examine your audience, put yourself in the shoes of a client and look at your site from a completely different perspective thanks to UX audit.
Website user experience audit will come out for your site much cheaper than development. That’s because this is a way that identifies your mistakes and shortcomings in the work of your site and helps to eliminate them without completely redoing everything all over again. Qualitative functionality may be hindered by one factor, after the elimination of which everything will fall into place and begin to work correctly. That’s why it’s better to resort to small things first, to fix all the shortcomings and errors before radically tackling the site again.
UX audit will help identify problem areas where conversion is lost. What obstacles arise in the way of your users. And also, allows you to build a strategy based on empirical data. User experience audit is a rational solution for those who observe the risk in global design changes. If your site has a number of problems, but still brings some profit, there is a fear of changing it or completely redesign.
In this case, it is more practical to gradually address the critical shortcomings identified during the UX audit process than to completely change the site.
If you want to get step-by-step instructions on how to conduct UX audit of your site yourself – subscribe to our blog and find out how to do it.
If you are still not sure that you can do it by yourself, then you can contact the team of our Gapsy Studio specialists and we will be happy to help you solve problems with your site and improve its functionality.
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Do you have any questions? We tried to answer most of them!
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