Unveiling Success: Axelerant’s Expert UX Audit Techniques

Introduction

In 2016, Instagram went through a design overhaul with a surprising result.

Fueled by new features and seamless mobile user experience, the social media platform doubled its user base in two years. User engagement and adoption further increased with the launch of “Stories,” the copy of a similar feature from Snapchat.

Such design overhauls should ideally be done after conducting a user experience audit. 

What Is A UX Audit?

A user experience (UX) audit is a thorough, data-driven evaluation of an app's or a website's user experience. It enables organizations to assess design choices and discover areas of improvement. This ensures alignment of the design with user needs and expectations.

We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.

- Donald A. Norman, Co-Founder, Nielsen Norman Group

Why Do Organizations Need A UX Audit

88% of online customers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.  

44% of customers will tell their friends about a bad online experience. 

Conducting a UX audit becomes crucial in this context. It helps organizations in:

Identifying Usability Issues

A UX audit helps identify gaps in usability, which also translates to better performance, customer engagement, and conversion rates. 

For example, Amazon’s early stage website interface demonstrates everything that can go wrong with a website’s usability. This includes poor navigation, lack of familiarity, and visual clutter. 

The latest version of the Amazon website is an eCommerce success story, offering a much more intuitive interface. It provides easy navigation and personalized recommendations via advanced algorithms. Seamless mobile optimization and a simplified checkout process enhance user experience, making the interface user-friendly for shoppers.

Provide Insights Into User Behavior And Needs

Design audits offer valuable insights into how users interact with a product, informing future design decisions. These insights help tailor designs to meet user needs and improve overall user experience.

Enhancing User Satisfaction

A UX audit helps organizations identify design improvement scope by implementing major aspects of user delight. These include helpful error messages, legible text, and useful filters. Such elements make the experience seamless for the users and make them delighted. This enhances user engagement and boosts customer loyalty.  

Reducing User Frustration

According to Delottie’s Milliseconds Make Millions report, websites taking longer than 10 seconds lead to frustrated users. A UX audit helps identify similar areas of frustration across the user journey for better design decisions. 

Improve Performance

UX audits assess digital product performance to ensure speed and responsiveness across all devices. Addressing performance issues helps reduce bounce rates and enhances user satisfaction by delivering a seamless user experience across platforms.

Streamlining Navigation

The Yale School Of Art website is a classic example of bad navigation. The complex menus, visual clutter, and unclear pathways make navigating the site difficult for visitors.

A UX audit helps outline navigation issues. This streamlines the user journey, resulting in efficient content discovery and better conversions.  

Maintain Design System Consistency

Consistency across design elements is crucial for a cohesive user experience. Audits help maintain this consistency across design systems, vital for brand identity and user trust, and address discrepancies between different device views.

Identifying Accessibility Concerns

Accessibility is one of the integral parts of a great user experience. Without identifying and fixing accessibility issues early on, businesses may suffer losses. It may also lead to lawsuits. A UX audit helps organizations identify accessibility issues to comply with the regulations and reach a broader audience. 

Ensure Legal Compliance

Audits ensure that digital products adhere to relevant laws and regulations, reducing legal risks and protecting the brand's reputation. Compliance fosters user trust and helps avoid potential legal and financial issues.

Enhancing Competitive Advantage

Statistics from PwC state that 59% of US customers will abandon a brand they love after several bad experiences. A UX audit helps organizations set the stage for better user experience and gain a competitive advantage.  

For instance, the streaming app Netflix's dedication to a user-friendly interface and tailored content suggestions enhance the immersive streaming experience. This commitment to satisfying users and personalizing content has firmly established Netflix as a frontrunner in the fiercely competitive streaming industry.

Reduce Development Costs

Identifying and addressing issues early through audits can prevent costly redesigns and redevelopment later. This proactive approach saves time and money, reducing overall development costs.

How To Conduct A UX Audit: The Axelerant Way

At Axelerant, we take a meticulous approach is  to ensure the process is thorough and yields actionable insights. 

The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Understand The Business Goals 

Before conducting a UX audit, comprehend the business objectives associated with the product. Align the evaluation with the organization's goals, like increasing sales, brand visibility, or user engagement. This will guide the audit process, helping bring the focus on areas that directly impact these goals.

Step 2: Understand User Behavior

A deep dive into the user's perspective is the second step of a UX audit. Understanding how users interact with the product and what they aim to accomplish provides context for the evaluation and helps identify the scope for improvement.

Using various analytical tools for user behavior is a popular option.  

Tools such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg produce heatmaps that visually depict user clicks, movements, and time spent on a page. This visual information assists in identifying patterns, optimizing page layouts, and pinpointing elements that capture or divert user attention. 

Session recording tools such as Mouseflow and SessionCam permit UX experts to observe live user sessions, reveal user challenges, highlight navigation issues, and showcase user interactions with specific features.

Step 3: Perform Heuristic Usability Evaluation

Heuristic Usability Evaluation involves assessing the product against established design principles, like Nielsen's 10 heuristic design principles. This step puts businesses in the user's shoes and evaluates the product from their perspective.

The following table provides steps to conduct a heuristic evaluation.

Step 4: Create User Personas and Map Customer Journeys

To gain a deeper understanding of the target audience, Axelerant develops user personas and maps customer journeys. This visualization helps identify friction points and optimize the user experience.

Step 5: Analyze Conversion And Web/App Data

Examining conversion metrics and detailed usage data is essential for pinpointing areas that need improvement. Axelerant leverages this analysis to identify and address critical performance issues.

Step 6: Interview Users And Review Feedback

Direct user feedback is integral to Axelerant’s approach. By conducting interviews and reviewing user session recordings, the team gains valuable insights from the users' perspectives, informing the audit findings.

Step 7: Identify And Prioritize Issues

Axelerant documents all identified design issues and prioritizes them based on their impact on user experience and business objectives. This prioritization helps focus efforts on the most critical areas for improvement.

Step 8: Develop Hypotheses For UX Improvements

Based on the issues identified, Axelerant formulates actionable hypotheses to address the problems. These hypotheses guide the design improvements and ensure they are targeted and effective.

Step 9 : Compile Findings And Make The Report

After the audit, findings from the heuristic evaluation and any data analysis are compiled into a comprehensive report. This report outlines the identified issues, categorizes them based on severity, and provides actionable recommendations for improvement. Accessibility concerns are also highlighted, along with suggestions for addressing these concerns.

By following these expert procedures and leveraging advanced tools, Axelerant ensures a design audit that not only identifies critical issues but also provides actionable solutions to enhance overall user experience.

Challenges In Conducting A UX Audit 

Before diving into a UX audit, it is important to note three of the most common challenges faced by organizations.

Defining Scope

The main challenge in a UX audit is setting clear project boundaries. A UX audit examines various aspects like functionality, usability, and aesthetics. But trying to uncover everything can be overwhelming. This can result in many findings that may not be practical. 

To prevent this, clearly defining the audit's purpose, goals, and deliverables is crucial. Involve stakeholders, set realistic expectations and deadlines, and prioritize addressing crucial issues and opportunities. For instance, on an ecommerce website, instead of evaluating all website features, focus on improving one critical feature, such as the checkout process.

Resistance To Change

A UX audit might propose changes demanding substantial resources, time, or effort. Some stakeholders or users might resist adopting these changes, driven by the fear of failure, lack of trust, misunderstandings, and technical hurdles.

Organizations can mitigate this challenge by engaging different departments in the UX audit process to bring diverse perspectives and expertise to the evaluation. It's also recommended to conduct workshops, courses, and training sessions on fundamental UX principles and best practices for the teams.

Gated Properties And Restricted Access

Restricted access in gated properties, marked by credential limitations, can disrupt digital workflows. It prevents teams from accessing specific areas of a website or app during a UX audit. 

For example, a delay in accessing critical content leads to delays, miscommunications, and frustration. The solution is to take UX audits as an iterative process, as this equips teams with more time to deal with gated properties and restricted access.

How Axelerant Helped Implement Red Hat’s UX Audit  

Red Hat wanted to offer a fresh learning journey for developers, driven by seamless user experience. They approached Axelerant with two key challenges:

• Restructuring the information architecture on the website for seamless user journeys  
• Creating a roadmap for the portal’s business objectives through design

Backed by the Design Thinking and How Might We frameworks, the approach ensured that the portal would be able to solve user problems. It included a usability audit, information architecture and navigation redesign, and website redesign. 

This led to a more engaging developer portal with enhanced user experience.

When To Conduct A UX Audit

Knowing when to conduct a UX audit is crucial for maximizing its benefits. Here are key indicators that suggest it might be time for an audit:

Modernizing WRAP’s Website Through Expert UX Audit

WRAP is a climate action NGO working around the globe to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future. Established in the UK in 2000, it now works in over 50 countries.

Business Challenge

In preparation for their upcoming website redesign, WRAP decided to use a data-driven approach with an expert UX audit. The client wanted their new site to inspire audiences, encourage change, attract investments and new business, meet user needs with relevant content and resources, and clearly articulate their mission and activities.

They faced significant challenges such as:

• Ineffective communication of the products and services 
• Lack of lead generation capabilities
• Missing data-driven approach to identify and meet business and user needs 
• Limited global reach and poor alignment with WRAP's evolving global focus
• Inadequate accessibility and inclusivity for the users
• Lack of a comprehensive content strategy 

Solution

To ensure WRAP's website revamp and rebranding aligned with its evolving global focus, Axelerant helped:

1. Conduct An Audit Aligned With The Agreed Deliverables: Through extensive internal and user research, we deep-dived into WRAP's existing audience, understanding how they interacted with the site.
2. Carry Out Detailed Research: We sought to uncover opportunities enabling the target audience to self-serve and enhance their overall experience. This was critical to determine how effectively the current website communicated WRAP's offerings.
3. Identify Key Areas Of Improvement: We helped WRAP boost the website's lead generation capabilities, especially for voluntary agreements and new investments.
4. Develop Content Strategy: We recommended 'always-on' content and a robust content marketing approach to keep WRAP's audiences engaged and informed and ensure the website resonated with international audiences.
5. Focus On Inclusivity and Accessibility: Axelerant emphasized the importance of an accessible website and provided recommendations to ensure that WRAP's mission and resources are available to everyone.

Our approach to implementing the solutions included Heuristic Analysis, Expert UX Design Audit, User Journey Mapping, and Competitor Analysis.

Results

The audit reports provided WRAP with a clear roadmap for website enhancement, ensuring that the upcoming website revamp project will be well-informed and strategically aligned. 

A UX audit paves the way to frictionless user experience regardless of your organization’s scale. Not sure where to start? Talk to our experts and learn more.