Why every digital product could benefit from a UX audit (and how to do one)

Overview

UX audit findings can help you focus on the biggest opportunities to improve your product or website from a user experience perspective. Unearth wider opportunities within your product to hit business goals. 

You can run audits with varying levels of detail, they don’t need to take a huge amount of time. Running them at regular intervals can help you take a step back and prioritise next steps. An ideal time to run one, for example, is before roadmap planning—this can help you to make strategic decisions on what to do next, with evidence to back it up.

Design, content and tech debt can grow as you launch new features, or add more messaging. As you focus on features in isolation, you can sometimes lose the big picture and thus miss out on meeting targets and spying new opportunities. 

Often, your product or website is taking people on a journey and each stage needs to harmonise with another. When this happens effectively, growth and retention goals can be both achieved and often (in my experience) surpassed!  

Looking at the wider goals of your customers or users and then optimising each smaller journey can give you fantastic results.

Once you share audit findings with your teams you can help create mutual understanding and remind everyone of the motivations of your customers or users.

Benefits of a UX audit

Along with aligning your teams and prioritising next steps, you can also improve user satisfaction; reduce drop-offs, boost conversion rates and save time and money on rework.

What does a UX audit consist of?

There are some typical activities that make up a UX audit. Every audit is conducted on a case-by-case basis, you may not need to complete all the activities, it depends on your audit’s goals.

• User journey mapping - a visual representation of how customers or users travel through your product. On this map you can highlight where users encounter issues, as well as where they have positive experiences in usability testing. You can also add quantitative data to highlight things like conversion rates, drop-offs and usage numbers.

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• Content and navigation analysis / audit - do all the in-page links go to the correct places? Is the copy clear and comprehensive? Is the content relevant? Does it match your brand’s tone-of-voice. Usually here I create a page-by-page content breakdown, a trusty spreadsheet will do the job for collecting all the information in one place.
  

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• Navigation analysis - It can be helpful to map out how the navigation works across your product journey or website, you can use this map to visually highlight any opportunities and issues to your team.

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• Usability testing - here usually I would recommend running 5 user tests on an existing journey to get 85% of the main usability issues. You can run in-person or remote sessions and you can conduct moderated sessions (where you are present and have the opportunity to ask specific questions to your users), or unmoderated sessions using platforms like User Testing or Maze.

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• Heuristics evaluation - analyse each screen / section / element against Nielsen Norman’s 10 Heuristics (user interface best-practices). I've written a more in-depth guide on how to conduct a heuristics analysis.

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• Visual design consistency - here you can check your screens match with your design system / style guide / brand guidelines. 

• Accessibility review - this can often work well when testing with people with accessibility requirements in your user test (25% of the population have some type of accessibility requirement so don't forget to keep a variety of needs in mind!) Next, you want to look at things like colour contrast, text sizes, zoomability, keyboard navigation, correct heading hierarchy, screen-reader navigation, amongst other things. I use tools like Wave to check how accessible the code implementation is on websites, for example.

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Along with these activities — although it's not specifically an auditing tool — I usually also run a competitor review at the same time in order to gather inspiration and examples for post-analysis recommendations. 

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What does a UX audit project look like?

Plan 

‍Capture goals and objectives - You'll want to start with understanding expectations and defining what success looks like for your audit. You may want to capture everyone’s initial assumptions on where they believe things are less effective and make sure you cover these areas in your audit. Too many assumptions can take your product down the wrong paths, so try and validate them as much as possible. Usually it’s good to do this either in a 1-pager or in a whiteboarding tool like Miro or Mural.

Gather data - Benchmarking is really important. You want to show everyone how much impact your audit findings make. You also want to use data to investigate where potential drop-offs or low conversions are happening — you can then use your testing sessions to find out why! You can gather data through Google Analytics, heat mapping tools like Hotjar, or analytics tools like Pendo or Mixpanel. Qualitative data is also useful here, so if you can get hold of support tickets, read reviews, access any recent relevant user research that can be very helpful too.

Conduct or get hold of some competitor research - Although not strictly an auditing tool, context of who else is in your customer's mind can help you understand user expectations. This will help you prepare for user testing follow-up questions and assist with later recommendations.

Map your product / journey - Define the user journey you are focused on and map out your navigation and product. You can add usability testing findings to this map later. This process will help you plan your user testing sessions and understand the key journeys you want to usability test. It will also create a record for ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons later down the line.

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Discover

Run 5 usability testing sessions across your product journey or selected journeys - Write a testing script and schedule 5 testing sessions. Ideally these 5 participants should be target customers (although any testing is better than none!) For really transformative sessions, invite your team to watch — there’s nothing like watching your customers use your product to help your team understand your users’ goals and increase empathy for your customers. Gather your results and see where most participants come up against usability issues. Map these out on your user journey map. A good tip is to add powerful quotes from your testing participants to help communicate the why of any key usability issues on this visual map.

Run a heuristics, accessibility, content and visual design analysis - To help prioritise even more, add the additional evidence of best practice analyses. If, for example, 5 testers find an issue and it also goes against best practice you know it will be a high priority to fix from a UX perspective. 

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Prioritise and fix

Present findings, recommend and prioritise - Now you will likely have a lot of actionable suggestions for improvement, but you will probably not have enough time to tackle all of them. Present the key recommendations to the team using your user journey map, and other visual aids. Examples from competitors can be useful in explaining your points.

It’s often helpful to assess solutions against impact and feasibility. You may want to use frameworks like RICE or tools like a prioritisation quadrant to help visualise what you need to tackle first. 

You may want to run a team prioritisation workshop, first presenting the issues, then recommendations and after, getting the team to vote on how tackling each of them would sit from a feasibility / viability perspective.

It helps to agree on addressing some quick wins to make immediate progress. 

You can then move agreed fixes into a roadmap.

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Common UX issues unearthed in audits

Confusing navigation - Confusing terminology, lack of usability for people using accessibility tools, too many categories — navigation is a common area where problems lie.

Poor mobile experience - Many B2B or SaaS tools are optimised for a desktop experience. However, ever-increasingly people like to use tools on their phone on the go. Audits can be great for identifying areas for improvement.

Unclear content - Products are often packed with industry jargon, acronyms or branded terms. The assumption is that everyone understands these things but in reality they often do not.

Slow loading times - The cumulative effect of these can lead to customers bouncing, but often these delays go unnoticed in isolation. 

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Implementing and measuring improvements post audit 

Don’t forget to measure against your benchmarking data as you make improvements. Incrementally test how the changes are helping using A/B testing, in-product surveys or additional testing or feedback sessions. 

Schedule your follow-up audits to ensure you regularly optimise your user journeys and avoid having to do large amounts of re-work. Stay ahead of your competitors and keep customer satisfaction high.

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Get started running a UX audit 

The best way to get started is to run a UX audit on a small journey in your product or web pages. You can run one yourself using the resources below, or you can partner with a UX / product design professional like me. If you don’t have a lot of in-house support, I can also offer coaching for non-designers to help product builders conduct regular audits as a team and prioritise and implement findings. 

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Resources and templates

User journey mapping:
Miro user journey map template

Content audit:
Content audit template

Usability heuristics:
Understanding how to apply Nielsen Norman's 10 Usability Heuristics (with examples)

Accessibility:
WCAG guidelines

Prioritising improvements:
‍ Prioritisation matrix
ICE / RICE prioritisation

Competitor research:
Competitor review template