One of the most interesting challenges we work on as a team is helping clients undertake a UX audit. If your product or app isn’t performing in the way you expected, a UX audit is a way to try and uncover where the potential issue may lie. The process requires not only solid UX skills but also relies heavily on data to help inform the audit’s focus and subsequent recommendations.

An audit is usually done on existing products or websites, but it could equally be used to validate an MVP or new product features. Once you understand the framework it is an invaluable skill in your UX armoury.

The primary goal of the UX audit is to answer these four questions about user behaviour:

• Where do users drop off?
• What do users not understand in your interface?
• Why does that happen?
• Where could you improve your product?

When you know the answers to these questions you will start to understand what the potential solutions look like.

The process

The process we use has five steps, whilst this can vary in certain cases, the framework we use is pretty simple and can be applied to both websites, digital products and even services:

1- Understand the commercial objectives.

2- Get to know the users.

3- Review the available analytics.

4- Undertake the product evaluation.

5- Compile your findings and recommendations.

Understanding the commercial objectives

Before undertaking any UX audit it is always best to first understand the commercial objectives of the business. An in-house UX team should already have a pretty good handle on this, but for external consultants like ourselves, it is an invaluable place to start the discovery process.

Why are they considering an audit in the first place? Have they noticed any issues or points of friction, what is the goal of the audit, is it to increase retention, reduce user drop-off, or increase the average basket size? All of these are really great questions and will help inform the steps that follow later. Understanding the commercial objectives will also help you identify the best metric to measure success, post-audit.

What works well in the product, and what is not working as well, have they noticed any user flows that appear to be not working as anticipated? This is all great to know. Ultimately the objective of this step is to really understand what is driving the audit and also the desired outcome.

At this point, we also like to interview all of the key stakeholders in the business. Speak to the company leadership, Designers, Developers and Product Owners, aim to understand as much as possible about the business and its goals.

Get to know the users

Now you understand the objectives, it’s time to find out more about the product’s users.

A great place to start is with user personas. The client may already have these available to review, if not it is a really good idea to create personas of your own. What is a user persona? Simply put, it’s a fictional person you create that aligns with the company’s target customer/s. We have covered user personas in other posts, so won’t go into too much detail here. Check out our story on “How to run a brand strategy workshop” to find out more. Always look at any UX work through the eyes of your user/user personas. Remember, you are not necessarily designing the product for someone like you, but for a specific customer type. Also, try to understand the user’s goals and motivations when using the product, why are they here and what are they hoping to achieve.

“It’s only natural to assume that everyone uses the Web the same way we do, and — like everyone else — we tend to think that our own behavior is much more orderly and sensible than it really is.” — Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think.

Want to take your understanding of the users even further? Then why not conduct some user interviews. We aim to interview no more than six users, after this, the insights do not greatly differ. In the case of an audit, focus on existing customers that are familiar with the product, they are best positioned to highlight points of friction, any technical issues and generally provide really constructive feedback on the product or website. For specific content on how to conduct user research, take a look at this post on our blog.

One final thing we often find useful is looking at customer reviews. Look at the companies’ Google Business and Trustpilot reviews to see if you can identify any other trends and valuable feedback. If several customers highlight a particular experience they find frustrating, it warrants you dig a bit deeper to find out more.

Review the analytics

As we always say “The data doesn’t lie!”. Data insights are invaluable to the UX audit, they help reinforce your assumptions and also often confirm insights from the user interviews.

Google Analytics is a great starting point, if the site also has tools like Mixpanel and Hotjar connected, even better. These tools provide indisputable, quantitative and qualitative data about who’s interacting with the product and what they’re doing while they’re there. You cannot beat session recordings and heat maps to get a really granular look at how users interact with your product. No guesswork is needed, the data never lies!

Analytics should help you identify problem areas; issues with specific device types, user paths, site speed, drop-offs and much more. Don’t just look for the negative, also look out for positive behaviour and things that work well, this can help inform some of your UX recommendations. Use the data to identify any trends and provide focus ahead of undertaking the product evaluation in the next step.

Undertake the product evaluation

The evaluation is your opportunity to get hands-on with the product. An experienced UX Designer should know good UX when they see it, use your skills to assess the product, making sure it follows best practices and usability heuristics. What are usability heuristics? 25 years ago Jakob Nielsen gave us the 10 general principles for interaction design. These principles were developed based on years of experience and they’ve now become rules of thumb for human-computer interaction, use these as your guide when assessing the product.

Use what you have learnt from the previous steps to provide a guide on particular areas of focus, beyond that also try to use the product as a user would, keeping in mind our user personas and their goals.

Ideally, more than one person should evaluate the product, if you can get both a design and technical eye, all the better. Also, make sure you run the evaluation on different device types, the experience can be hugely different between devices, a vital step in a thorough audit!

Be methodical, take notes and make sure nothing is missed. Using a screen recording tool such as Loom can be helpful to provide spoken commentary and feedback as you go through the product with a fine-toothed comb.

Compile your findings and recommendations

Once the evaluation is complete, you can now put all of your findings into a report for the client. We like to make the report quite visual, using screenshots, user flows, prototypes and data to support the written word and give the report real weight.

As well as highlighting areas of improvement, a vital part of the report is your recommendations to remedy any UX concerns identified. Try to avoid panning the product and don't come across as overly negative, but rather focus on actionable things that will make a real difference in achieving the commercial objectives we define at the outset. Ultimately, the recommendations should help move the needle toward achieving the client's goals.

Finally, what are the next steps? Once any recommendations have been implemented, keep a close eye on analytics to make sure any changes are having the desired impact. As we said, the data doesn’t lie!

Some final takeaways…

• Set clear objectives for the audit from the outset.
• Understand the user's motivations and goals.
• User interviews can give you powerful insights from customers
• Gather information from unexpected sources, such as customer reviews.
• Use qualitative data to guide your evaluation and provide areas of focus.
• Undertake the evaluation through the eyes of the user.
• Be positive and give clear recommendations in your report.

Now that you know how to run a UX audit, you might want to find out more about UX design. These other resources may be helpful:

The 10 best UX laws and principles.

The 7 best UX design books.

Why user testing is essential to UX design.

UX design colour psychology.

As always we would love to hear your thoughts, do let us know in the comments below if you have any questions or want to know more!

Like what you hear, would you like us to undertake a UX audit on your product? We are a friendly bunch, come and say hello 👋

Much ❤️ 🧡 💛 💚