The Gist
- Understand the purpose of a UX audit. Insights gleaned from a UX audit may be necessary to improve the user experience.
- Know when to implement an audit. An audit may help identify usability issues, assist the user journey and so on.
- Make a findings report. Reporting on the results of an audit can provide more clarity and direction for your UX team.
A UX audit is an essential tool for any business seeking to optimize its website or app for maximum user engagement and satisfaction. By systematically evaluating usability, design, content and functionality, a UX audit can identify critical issues that hinder user experience and provide actionable recommendations for improvement.
What Is a UX Audit?
A UX audit offers an independent, expert review of a website or app that systematically evaluates usability, design, content, functionality and engagement challenges from the perspective of target customers. It identifies issues that prevent consumers from using your website or app and ultimately meeting your business goals.
If your ineffective website/app is lacking the resources for a full-fledged research project, a UX audit can be an effective bridge tool. Not only do they offer a quick turnaround, most audits are also moderately priced and require no special equipment. Having an independent third party evaluation also offers a fresh perspective your company may need.
While similar to heuristic evaluation (which involves several trained experts reviewing the site or app independently then combining the results for reporting), a UX audit doesn’t require the money to hire several experts or time to train them in-house.
Related Article: UX Research vs. UX Design: Exploring Key Differences
When to Use a UX Audit
A UX Audit can be a helpful tool for a variety of reasons, including:
- If your company lacks in-house UX expertise
- If you need quick results to inform further planning
- A means to gain a buy-in for research and/or design efforts
- Users aren’t available in the near term
- Prototypes/designs aren’t available in the near term
Oftentimes, reason No. 1 goes hand in hand with reasons two and three. Together, they provide the evidence needed to get outside research and design projects funded. If, for example, the board of a women’s organization did not agree on whether a website redesign was needed to attract new members, UX audit findings helped gain support for a redesign.
Here’s another example to highlight the benefits for the latter two reasons: On a large project, an outside vendor is designing a new website, but the internal team does not have permission to test it externally during that phase. With a huge deadline looming overhead, they’d need a UX audit to help plan next steps.
When Not to Use a UX Audit
A UX audit is not a replacement for user research with real or potential customers, which offers unmatched insights into how a product may or may not meet their needs. If there is persistently no time or money for research with actual users, a larger cultural shift may be needed to understand the value of research.
Related Article: UI and UX: What’s the Difference?
What Does a UX Audit Consist Of?
While there is no standard UX audit process, some key components include:
- Defining the scope: Although you can conduct a UX audit of an entire site or app, focusing on a particular task or delivery method allows you to home in on specific goals. These may include purchase transactions, enrollment processes, mobile visitors, first time visitors and so on.
- Utilizing available analytics and customer feedback data: These can further help identify focus areas.
- Utilizing business goals: Ultimately, incorporating priorities helps gain stakeholder buy-in.
- Defining the target customer(s): Utilizing customer profiles and/or personas along with available customer feedback and analytics helps highlight current behavior and pain points.
What Criteria to Use for a UX Audit
UX audits can typically use a mix of usability and interaction design best practices including Jakob Nielsen‘s Usability Heuristics and Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb. Prioritizing task completion is key because consumers use websites or apps to instantaneously get things done — including paying bills, reading articles, chatting with friends or scrolling new videos.
Examples of UX criteria include:
- “Visibility of System Status” might relate to submitting a form. Does a message appear to let users know the form has been successfully submitted? (Jakob Nielsen‘s 10 Usability Heuristics)
- “Findability” may relate to how easy or difficult it is to find a particular product using the menu or search feature for a purchase. (Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb)
The UX audit should cover some accessibility issues with color contrast, images and site structure, but this doesn’t replace an Accessibility Audit to help organizations meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Related Article: Using User Experience Analysis to Improve Customer Journeys
What to Expect from a UX Audit
From the initial kickoff to final report, a UX audit can be completed within five days, but seven-to-10 is the norm. A full UX audit of a complex website can take several weeks to ensure both a comprehensive evaluation and actionable report.
A strong final UX audit findings report should include:
- Key strengths and weaknesses of the website
- A prioritized list of issues
- High, medium or low priority is assigned depending on severity, scope and impact
- Images and/or videos to illustrate these issues
- Recommendations to enhance the overall user experience
During their report presentation, stakeholders have an opportunity to ask questions and gain clarity on any of the findings. Additionally, time should be set aside to discuss next steps as committing to and implementing changes are important.
In the end, stakeholder engagement during the report presentation not only clarifies findings but also paves the way for actionable next steps, ensuring the UX audit’s insights translate into meaningful improvements through subsequent usability testing.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
