UX Audits and Businesses Growth.

Looking back in retrospect to see how best digital products are performing while tightening loss ends to provide optimal experiences to users.

As a business owner, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the toil of running a business. In recent times, it is popularly advised to create an online presence for your brand. This can fall in line with having a brand identity created, setting up an instagram and or Twitter profile or going as far as to create a website or landing page for your business with the aim of racking in as many customers as possible. Phew, that is a lot.

For business that has all these laid out for some time now — Well done! For those that are just considering going online, now is the perfect time.

This article is focused on User Experience audits as it relates to business growth and development. User experience can easily be said to be how your users feel from the moment they start interacting with your brand to the moment you meet their needs, solve their problem or chase them away. The entire feeling can be captured in User Experience.

Ok pause. Are you a business owner? Are you in charge of a business or are you merely crafting experiences knowingly or unknowingly? Well if you are one of the aforementioned, you probably should continue reading this.

UX Audit and Business growth.

My bad, I got carried away for a second that I veered off track. The focus for this article will be on the audit of the experiences users have with digital products directly and how it affects businesses.

Before we go further, we should understand what UX audit is all about.

UX Audit - A User experience audit is a systematic evaluation of a product’s user experience. Product could be a website, an application or even a service that a brand or business offers.

Though a majority of what I will write will be focused on products that are either Websites or applications, it does not reduce the important of having an experience audit for you business no matter how small. Well that discussion will be covered in another article.

Why UX Audits?

As earlier stated, a UX audit is an evaluation. An evaluation of products, systems and processes to identify lapses and areas of improvements so as to create the optimal user experience for customers. There are a ton of alternatives to different products and users do not think twice about moving on to your competition if you provide them with a poor experience, hence why a UX audit is important every now and again.

Businesses are ever evolving and living entities that said, the success of any business lies in her ability to understand the needs of users/customers and then look for the best ways possible to meet those needs while acting within a reasonable budget of course.

Why do you need a UX audit for your business? Here’s why:

Increase in user retention and conversion rates: Have you even gone through some websites and you do not spend more than a few seconds on the first page? You close it and go somewhere else you believe has what you are looking for. Well that could be that the website has a couple of usability issues that you’d rather not deal with, hence your dropping off.

A lot of company websites and landing pages experience this, having a whopping 60% drop-off rate and above, meaning more than half your visitors do not stay to complete any tasks. With a UX audit done promptly, brands can ascertain what the issue is and promptly solve for it so as not to lose any more prospects.

Competitive advantage: John C. Maxwell; New York times best selling author always say ‘…people will always remember how you make them feel.’ And that could be more than myriads of resources spent on running ads and promotions.

When UX audits are done, it gives insights into what your competition is doing that the market enjoys. By delivering a better user experience, you can gain a competitive edge and attract more users. If you make me feel good with your product, I for one will always come back (..as long as it meets my needs of course. 👀)

Cuts costs and saves time and resources: Imagine spending a ton of resources on Facebook ads and promotions only to find that the prospects you bring and try to onboard to your platform have difficulties using your products when you are not there. Worst still, imagine it a product that requires users to put a little bit of cash into your platform so as to continue to use the services and it just so happens that they have a bad experience with your platform, that in itself has given you a PR that may stain your brand image. An audit from time to time will help identify cases like these why proffering solutions that works.

Conclusion
A lot of businesses exist and by all standards they are doing well, but how much better do you imagine them doing when they stop to pay attention to review the experiences they offer to their customers. Sure a UX audit may not be a mandatory step in running a successful business but it sure is necessary if you want to continually scale.