12 Reasons why you should invest in a Good UX Audit for your website or app.
In the world we live in today, everyone’s focus is on the screens. What we see on our laptops, mobile phones, and any other gadget is something that is occupying most of our time and energy.
It is a great responsibility for a UX/UI designer to make sure that the human brain is not exhausted looking at all sorts of content on the internet.
UX Audit helps in pinpointing the areas an interface is lacking in and helps to rectify such problems.
What happens in a UX Audit?
UX Audit is conducted by a bunch of trained and experienced evaluators.
The first step usually involves the exploration of the interface. An individual evaluator or a group of evaluators explore through the interface as a user and note down all the usability issues.
The next step involves evaluating the interface on the basis of the 10 Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen. These Heuristics help to know the problems in depth.
The final step involves the representation of all the data collected in a Report with suggestions for rectification.
Why choose UX Audit over user testing?
- UX Audit is done by trained professionals and hence the result is more precise.
- It takes lesser time than user testing.
- It can be done in the early stages of development whereas user testing happens when the interface is sent out in the market for the users to go through.
Benefits of a UX Audit.
Following are the 12 major benefits of getting a UX Audit done for your website:
1. Higher rate of conversion
Conversion refers to the visitors on your website performing a desirable action or initiating communication such as subscribing to your newsletter or engaging in business.
There are a lot of factors influencing the conversion rate. Besides a captivating value proposition, customers are largely influenced by their experience with the service itself.
Whereas an average value proposition can be compensated with amazing design, it doesn’t work the other way round.
If users aren’t satisfied with their experience on your website, no matter how good your service is, THERE WILL BE ZERO CONVERSIONS.
Thus, a UX audit will greatly improve your user experience, leading to better engagement and higher conversion.
2. Pleased Customers
Most of the visitors on your homepage expect to see clear and concise information about your products and services. If the design comes in the way of meeting user expectations, then they will not waste their time on your website.
A UX audit will point out design inconsistencies and suggest much better alternatives that will ensure that your visitor will be satisfied while browsing your website.
3. Increased Brand association and awareness
The majority of the users do not want to consult or be associated with a brand that uses outdated web design. This means things like intrusive pop-up ads, too many different fonts, too many stock photos, bad usage of color, etc. These things easily annoy and distract a visitor.
Conducting a UX audit will help you revamp your design so that it is modern and appealing to the visitors.
This, in turn, will lead to higher brand awareness as a good experience will stay in the users’ minds and they are more likely to recommend it to others.
4. Increased ROI
Investing in good user experience is directly correlated with your business growth.
Good UX will always give you a higher return on investment and save you lots of costs.
How so?
Thoughtful user flows, simple buying/subscribing process, prominent CTAs- all of these result in higher conversions and reduces the work for other departments such as customer support or promotions.
A professional UX audit that uses top-quality benchmarks will help you in identifying user problems and creating a comprehensive plan to overcome them. Thus, investing in a UX audit will definitely guarantee that your business grows.
5. Every design decision is backed by data
All the metrics used in a professional UX audit are thoroughly researched and constantly tested.
Thus, every recommendation is not just merely an outsider’s opinion, it is backed by tons of supporting data and studies which are specifically conducted for creating a better user experience.
The audit recommends the best UX practices and design fixes that have already been tested and observed. Therefore, the audit will help you redesign your website keeping all this in mind and create a better experience for your users.
6. Gain a fresh perspective
Since you have complete knowledge about your own website or service, it is completely natural for you to overlook particular bugs or logical inconsistencies. This can reflect on your content as well, which will leave your visitors confused or dissatisfied if they cannot find what they’re looking for or if your USP is not clear.
A UX audit will help you get a fresh perspective on your website. You might even be surprised by some of the results as UX can be very subtle and otherwise you wouldn’t even consider some of the finer points.
Thus, you will get a different perspective about your own website which can be very insightful and aid in future development.
7. Save money on development
It is impossible to design meaningful solutions without identifying the core problems.
A UX audit will precisely specify problems or bugs on your website.
It will also categorize them based on different factors and prioritize them based on how critical it is. It will act as a guide to revamp your website, one step at a time.
Therefore, you will know exactly what the problem areas are and how to resolve them, instead of a complete redesign or redevelopment. This will save you a lot of time and money on high-cost programming tasks.
Thus, a UX audit will give you a comprehensive solution that is easy to implement and cost-effective.
8. Understand user behavior
When creating a website, you have certain expectations with how the user will interact and use your service. Whereas, when a user is browsing your website they have certain expectations as in ease of browsing and comprehensibility.
Understanding user expectations and beliefs will help you in creating a website that will match your expectations as well.
A UX audit will help you in gauging user behavior on your website and how you can use certain user tendencies to your advantage.
Remember, UX can be very subtle and users often judge your content sub-consciously before even making their decisions. Thus, it is very important to understand their behavior and use it to improve business.
9. Shape future user behavior
As mentioned in the previous point, a UX audit will help you match user behavior with expectations. You can use UX to also shape user behavior precisely as you want it.
Small design changes and quirks go a long way in affecting the visitor’s perception and having a subconscious impact.
Through a UX audit, you will get detailed stats about how certain choices in your design affects user behavior.
You can use these stats to redesign your website and tweak user behavior. Thus, when users associate your website with their positive experience browsing it, there will be much higher conversions.
10. Focus on specific problems
A UX audit is also a great idea if you simply want to focus on particular issues you might have on your website. (e.g, lack of system feedback, poor discoverability, error prevention, etc.).
Instead of revamping your entire website, you can focus on a few key areas to substantially improve the user experience and engagement.
A good audit will also provide you with quick fixes to instantly improve your website and give suggestions for further enhancement.
11. Make your product more accessible and responsive
In today’s day and age, when technology is at the forefront, it is your responsibility that your website is accessible to everyone, especially those who are specially-abled, such as someone who is visually impaired. For instance, your website must be easily navigable for someone who’s using a screen-reader.
Along with accessibility, another major factor to keep in mind is responsiveness i.e. how responsive is your website on different devices, such as a mobile phone or a TV.
A professional UX audit will give you insights in these areas as well, thus making sure that your website is aesthetically balanced and pleasing on all platforms or devices. It will also ensure that your website becomes accessible to more people, and anyone who uses it has a consistent user experience, whatever the medium is.
12. Professional help
UX Audit is done by a team of professionals who design and curate experiences. Through the audit, you gain invaluable insights and assistance which is backed by their years of experience.
Kustard design team focuses on giving accurate and precise reports with suggestions to rectify the smallest of the usability issues which in turn will help your business grow and result in greater conversions.
