TL;DR – w skrócieToday, your sales results depend largely on what kind of website you have. What’s more, it’s not just about how well it sells, but also about whether it helps you reach your goals.
Is your company website or app intuitive and easy for users to understand? Is it designed so that product sales grow, you collect more and more contact details, including from potential customers, and you steadily gain new subscribers to your company newsletter? Put simply, does it convert well?
If you’re not happy with the answer to any of these questions, it’s time for a UX audit. The UX/UI experts at 25wat explain what this review involves and what you gain by putting your company website through it.
A UX audit, also called a usability audit, is an expert review of a website as a whole: how well it matches its users’ expectations and skills. Do users, such as customers visiting the site, achieve their goals, like finding a product quickly? Do they get value in a simple, accessible way?
An audit also shows whether the website does what its owner expects: whether it’s an effective tool for hitting sales targets. And it checks whether the site was designed and built in line with accepted standards and trends.
There’s something called the false-consensus effect. It happens when we treat our own opinions and preferences as largely typical of our customers, assuming that others think like us and will act the same way in a given situation. Nielsen Norman Group’s article “You Are Not the User: The False-Consensus Effect” describes how designers, developers and even UX researchers fall for it: they project their own behaviors and reactions onto users and judge a website by themselves and their coworkers. This mindset can lead to business failures because it doesn’t put customers’ opinions first.
A UX auditor has the right expertise and some distance from the website, and bases the assessment on user behavior data, so it’s easier for them to avoid false conclusions. An external auditor:
Remember: user-centered design goes hand in hand with better business results. McKinsey’s study “The business value of design” (2018) tracked 300 publicly listed companies across several countries and industries for five years. Companies in the top quartile of the McKinsey Design Index, which rates companies on factors such as their approach to user experience, saw revenue growth 32 percentage points higher than their industry peers over that period.
To learn more about user experience (UX), what it is and why it supports sales, read our article What is user experience in IT?
Here are 6 reasons to run a UX audit:
The main benefit of a UX audit is finding out whether your website (or app) gives users what they expect when they visit it. If it does, and it’s also easy to use, users trust it more and grow more attached to it. That almost always shows up in your business metrics, for example as growing sales.
We call this relationship the UX loop. An audit shows you whether your company website runs on the UX loop.
To sum up: once you implement the recommended solutions, you’ll not only cut costs but also give users more benefits. By structuring your value proposition (UX strategy) and organizing the information on your site (information architecture), you’ll help users understand exactly what you’re offering them and what they stand to gain. By spotting and removing distractions along the purchase path, you’ll increase conversions.
With changes that make your website (or app) more intuitive, users will be happy to come back and recommend it to others. That pays off in more users and a higher conversion rate.
An expert review of a website, online store or app relies on established methods and tools, plus the auditor’s experience. The scope depends on the website and the company’s goals. Here are the typical stages of a UX audit.
The auditor collects hard data on how users move around the website (or app) and identifies areas that give them trouble or that they never visit at all. This gives you a picture of your target audience and how they navigate your website.
What does this involve? Heatmap analysis focuses on:
In the EU, heatmap tools can only collect data from users who have consented to cookies, so the map shows the behavior of only some of your visitors.
A heatmap follows one simple rule: the warmer the color, the more user activity (clicks) in that area.
At this stage, the auditor analyzes the website or app in terms of how users perceive and process what they see and how they remember information presented to them visually. The auditor steps into the shoes of the end user (defined earlier) and checks whether information is presented clearly and transparently. Based on that, they suggest how to make the site more accessible and functional, in other words, how to give it good UX.
This stage evaluates the site’s usability using the 10 heuristics of Jakob Nielsen, a usability specialist.
So what are these heuristics? They’re general guidelines on the elements that should be analyzed and changed first. They cover how intuitive and clear the site is for the end user, and they show what to do so that users can move around the site easily and achieve their goals.
The audit also covers the look and feel of the site. The expert compares it with competitors’ solutions and with trends and directions in digital product design, then points out which solutions and changes are worth implementing.
Sometimes a UI change is all it takes for users to click a key button more often, simply because they can see it.
A UX audit usually ends with a comprehensive report that, above all, contains specific solutions and recommendations.
Got questions about your website’s UX or planning to rebuild it? Write to us and we’ll answer them.
