Why UX Audit is a must for small businesses and entrepreneurs?
Optimizing your business growth through innovative design approaches.
What is UX Audit?
Audit : /ˈɔːdɪt/ is official inspection of an organization’s accounts, typically by an independent body. The UX Audit therefore refers to auditing of a user’s experience on a digital platform like an app, website, display screen etc.
Now what’s user experience?
User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.
No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service — from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.
— Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience”
Now that we are clear on what UX is and what UX Audit is, let’s deep dive into why you would need it especially if you are a small size business owner and you have a website/app for your business.
Why would you need UX Audit?
Generally, small businesses & entrepreneurs start with basic structuring of their website/app which includes structure, branding, messaging and the platform flow (of pages) for a user to experience on the digital platform.
Much of it is based on assumptions over designs, layouts and messages across their digital platforms. Also to mention, many businesses start by getting highly inspired from other/competitor websites and try emulating the same considering one simple assumption — It must be working for them, so it should work for us as well.
It might run well or may be not, but eventually it has a shelf life of its own. Some things working well for a website need not necessarily work well for you. Also, how would you know if it’s working well? Every business needs to analyze things that are working well for them and things that are not. That’s very important. And that’s where auditing your UX design kicks in.
UX Audit is a way to pinpoint less-than-perfect areas of a digital product, revealing parts of a website or an app that are causing headaches for users and stymieing conversions. Like financial audits, a UX audit uses empirical methods to expand an existing situation, and offer heuristics-based recommendations for improvements, in this case, user-centric enhancements. Ultimately, a UX audit should let you know how to boost conversions by making it easier for users to achieve their goals on your site,app or software.
In short, UX Audit answers few questions for young businesses and entrepreneurs:
- What’s working, and what’s not?
- Which metrics are being collected and which should be collected?
- What does the data tell you about user needs?
- What has already been tried, and what impact did it have on metrics?
A UX audit enables businesses to form hypotheses about user behavior present and future and, most importantly, an audit brings you closer to increased conversions and ROI once follow-up action is taken.
What makes up a UX Audit?
When setting out to improve products or services, experienced UX audit teams follow a well-planned scientific process divided into two parts: UX evaluation and user research.
UX expert auditors, UX researchers and designers use a variety of tools, methods and metrics to analyze the current state of a digital product.
UX experts review process involves areas such as:
- Business and user objectives
- Conversion metrics, churn and bounce rates
- Customer care data
- Usability guidelines compliance
- Mental modeling
- Design evaluation
- Application of UX best practices
How do you boost 💰 growth through UX Audit?
Outsource UX Audit to design companies. These companies are adept with all design related queries and have extensive experience in this domain.
- They have already tried, tested, failed, learned and succeeded. Hence, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
- They bring fresh eyes to your product and can easily spot errors.
- They are up-to-date with the latest design trends and guidelines so that you don’t have to worry if in case your site looks outdated.
- They are not on your payroll and hence cost efficient than hiring full-time designers who shall eventually fail to see errors as an outsider to the product.
- They have hands-on experience with optimizing conversions and can push couple of zeroes to your $ revenue numbers seamlessly.
Kustard.design is one of the few top design companies who help such early businesses, medium enterprises and entrepreneurs hack growth through design.
