6 Benefits of Conducting UX Audit for Your Product
Ashutosh Chandra | 21st August 2020
Businesses generally are in need of a UX audit when they are not satisfied with how their product is performing. What’s worse is, they don’t even know the reasons why it is happening. So, most of them hire a UX consulting agency for analyzing the data to amend the situation. This is where the role of UX audit comes into play.
Premises of a UX Audit
UX Audit is a special assessment designed to check how your product is performing in terms of usability and user experience. It enables us to examine and rate software products, which enables stakeholders to see what requires improvement.
UX Audit usually consists of four phases:
- Exploratory Research – The aim of this phase is to learn more about your product, both in terms of its challenges and your business goals.
- Deep Analysis – At this stage, we turn data into insights by leveraging Google Analytics, Hotjar, and other analytics tools. We also conduct market research to better understand the specific character of your line of business and to find competitive solutions.
- Actionable Recommendation – Ultimately, we turn insights into data-driven recommendations for UX improvements.
- Action Plan – It shows the next steps we need to take, with a roadmap for improvements. It enables your product to reach its full potential.
Who should consider a UX Audit?
UX consultants perform UX Audit to assist product owners, founders and marketers detect errors that they cannot perceive without it. It’s due to too much involvement with the product.
- Product Owners: who want to identify and fix problems that occur in the user interface
- Marketers: who are seeking ways to improve campaign conversion and wonder if the product properly plays its role in the customer journey
- Founders: who has access to the prototype and want to identify errors before moving to the development phase. It is much cheaper than fixing a finished product.
Benefits of UX Audit
Following are the 6 benefits of conducting UX audit for your product:
1. To redesign your product based on solid data, and not on predictions
The product shows symptoms but we don’t have data to find out the cause and to fix its problems. While performing the UX audit, we gather all available data at the very beginning. Then we look into the advised tools we should use for gathering more useful info. We look into the following factors:
- Review of business and user objectives
- Conversion metrics
- Customer Care data
- Sales data
- Traffic/Engagement
- Compliance with UX standards
- Usability Heuristics
- Mental Modelling
- Wire-framing & Prototyping
- UX Best Practices.
2. To move in the right direction and gain new product perspective
While working constantly on a product, we begin to miss certain bugs or logic flaws. It’s because we begin looking at it too objectively. The same goes for content. For the users who see your product for the first time, is USP and communication of your product clear to them? Are there any business jargon in your product descriptions? Fresh looks enable us to pick up those flaws, and point us in the right direction.
3. To compare your product with competitive solutions
Conducting a good competition analysis enables us to define key success factors in the industry. It assists to find out what supported its leaders to achieve their position, and what made others stay behind. We will also understand our weaknesses and strengths when compared to the competition. It will assist us to improve our advantages and eliminate flaws. It gives us a chance to stand out from the crowd and provide unique value.
4. To learn how your users behave and get to know them better
We conduct a product cognitive walk-through to know it from the user’s perspective. We will learn how our product fairs when it comes to achieving user goals, errors encountered by users, and compliance with business standards like Nielsen heuristics. This analysis provides qualitative data. We gather quantitative data from tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Firebase, or Mixpanel. Apart from the standard user acquisition channels or web traffic analysis, we’ll check how users behave when using our product based on heat maps and session recordings. It enables us to realize if our product is intuitive and if users behave as we expected.
5. Save expenses on development
If it’s not possible to identify the problems, then don’t design the solutions. A UX audit product is a report. It contains a UX improvement roadmap as well as suggestions regarding the value of your software. This improvement plan enables us to smoothly move to the redesign phase. During this phase, we will prepare only the essential additions and features. Then we will begin the development phase. It assists us to avoid making wrong decisions and taking your product in the wrong direction. It saves us from wasting time and money on costly programming work.
6. Increment in the profit
Implementing all those suggestions for changes will not only reduce costs but also increase profits. Also, improvements in the value proposition and communication will make your users understand your product faster. When we will find and eliminate distractions on the purchase path, it will increase conversion. Also, to streamline the onboarding and making a product more intuitive makes your customers more satisfied with your product. It results in a higher Net Promoter Score, lower churn rate, and an increased number of referrals.
Conclusion
Follow-up is the key to a successful product. Professional UX audit service assists to find errors that require fixing and discover new ways to increase ROI. Not implementing the suggestions for improvements from them will change nothing. So, contact our UX consulting services for assistance in conducting a UX Audit and Product redesign.
