Many SaaS organizations don’t clearly understand the value of user experience audits (UX audits), also known as UX reviews or usability audits.
They see it as an unnecessary expense that might not impact the bottom line. The truth is that UX audits are one of the most impactful investments any SaaS firm can make. You can uncover usability issues, identify and reduce design debt, and prime your product for more growth.
Right now, you might be thinking…
Yes. UX audits are one of the best ways to create a clear action plan to improve your product’s key metrics and refine the experience. There is a certain part in every product's life where there is a rush to just get features out of the door. Best practices become more of an ideal than a process we commit to.
All of these signs point to the need for a UX audit culture to be adapted.
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Everything you need for a killer DIY audit on your product.
A UX Audit is a structured way to identify any shortcomings within the existing UI and user flows. It's a repeatable process to find successful and unsuccessful patterns within the entire user experience of a product. Audits create actionable insights and metrics for a product team to focus on.
Through the audit process, you’ll also be able to evaluate the quality and consistency of the UI to spot any design debt related to the design system.
The goal is to identify portions of the user's journey that are causing unneeded friction. This is especially critical for startups, who are always breaking new ground. This will ensure that new products are widely accepted, usable, and intuitive.
While the overall user experience can be improved, here is a list of UX audit benefits for your customers and your team.
When do you fit the UX audit process into everything else happening with your team? Do they have to be big projects?
In the video below, Billy breaks down crucial moments for UX audits and how to leverage micro audits within your current design process.
While UX audits are beneficial at any time, doing one earlier in the process can help ensure that a product is designed with the user in mind and create an efficient workflow. UX audits should be part of the feature build process and the continuous discovery each team executes.
At the start of each new feature, auditing the existing product is crucial to the success of a new feature.
UX audits can also be used to find areas for improvement during the review or redesign process. In addition, usability testing is frequently performed as part of a UX audit to assess a product's user-friendliness.
Before you begin the auditing process, you need to answer these key questions and create alignment with your team on the goals of the audit.
The audit should assist you in identifying the core issues with your product that, if addressed, can improve conversion rates, product usability, and solve your users' complaints.
This depends on the goals and scope of the audit. With our UX audit process, it can take 3-6 weeks to complete with a typical SaaS product or website. If you have never done them before and have other project commitments, it could take longer. Keep this in mind when you plan to involve more people from your team.
To ensure a positive customer experience for our product, try to get as many stakeholders involved in the audit process as possible. Customer experience shouldn’t only be in the hands of designers alone.
Inviting development, marketing, sales, and product teams to these sessions will help you address the full spectrum of the experience.
Some stakeholders might not be familiar with a customer's entire experience and might only focus on what they know. Walking the team through the full customer journey to help them understand the potential friction points is a great way to set a baseline for the exercise.
A UX audit ensures that your product is user-friendly and consistent. You will discover the key areas for improvement and implement adjustments from a UX audit.
So, what should a typical UX audit consist of?
Access our free UX Audit Checklist and Guide.
UX audits must include a full walkthrough of the app/product or a specific feature. This walkthrough should cover our general procedures as well as any UX issues or pain areas.
Start with basic questions like
Examine the navigation
The next step is to evaluate the product’s usability. Different types of UX research methods can help you find answers.
Collecting troublesome user experience patterns into a collected state that can easily be viewed all at once is a helpful tool when presenting. For example, if you have a save pattern that is used throughout the app but is just bad UX, calling it out in the audit is super helpful.
We may need to include a component inventory when working with designed systems or trying to construct a system for a product. This could include taking screenshots of different components and how they are being used ineffectively across the product. The component inventory should also include color profiles and the typographic scale.
Learn about our free design system and UI kit for Figma.
It's also possible that we'll be tasked with doing an accessibility audit. To communicate concerns with contrast or color, taking a few images and using a tool like Contrast and Stark which are both Figma plugins will be extremely helpful. When doing an accessibility audit, don't forget to consider the typographic scale utilized in the product.
Think about the overall user experience
By considering all of these criteria, you can guarantee that your UX audit is complete and comprehensive. You may considerably improve the overall experience by acting on your audit findings.
There are different UX audit tactics that you can leverage. This is dependent on the scope of the project, the timeline, and the budget. You can start with a high-level review of the overall UX or you can do a detailed evaluation of specific areas such as usability or information architecture.
Access our free UX Audit Template for Figma.
A screenshot flow is similar to what we might create in an app or product flow. Instead of using blocks, we'll capture screenshots as we walk through the product. Connecting them in a tool like Figma or Whimsical, we'll want to make sure that we can visually represent the product flow.
In a screenshot flow, calling out key areas and issues is a bit easier in this style since we're not dealing with video like we are in the latter example. This will provide an easier look at the larger picture but might not capture the full nuance of the interactions a user is experiencing. So there might be opportunities to include some small videos.
One of the most effective ways to communicate and audit your product is to record yourself walking through the product and verbalizing any errors. You can record your screen while narrating the guide using the tools below.
Be deliberate with your walkthrough and look at the timestamps of important parts of your recording. If you need to, you can cut down the footage to talk about problems happening in more than one place. You can also include clips of users’ interviews expressing their frustrations or experiences through the product as well.
We recommend building an independent presentation in either Figma or Google Slides {Link} to discuss your findings while presenting your audit. This UX audit report will often be a high-level presentation for stakeholders, with links to more in-depth video walkthroughs, screenshot walkthroughs, or other artifacts you may have developed.
This procedure is comparable to how we would display data from user research. With your audit report, we’ll want to include the issues we’d like to address and a roadmap of the effort to get us to our new solution.
The roadmap should include some rough ideation of potential solutions and include things like if we’re going to do user interviews and testing on our solutions and how long we anticipate the changes to take on the design end and if there are any system updates that need to be had.
Access our free UX Audit Report Template for FIgma.
Many people attempt to do UX audits on products they’ve created or managed, but it could create some potential blind spots in the process.
Here are three reasons why conducting your UX audit without outside observation could create poor results:
When you're looking at your website or digital product, it's difficult to be objective. You're more likely to see what you want rather than what's actually there. A UX expert from an outside team will be able to give you an unbiased review.
UX is a complex field, and UX experts have years of training and experience. Without the right skills, you won't be able to properly evaluate the user experience of your website or app.
UX experts know what to look for when they're conducting an audit. They know what problems to look for and how to fix them. If you try to do a UX audit on a product you know inside and out, you might miss something important that could affect the usability of your website or app. You could also miss things like design debt.
Consider conducting a UX audit if you want to improve the usability of your platforms to increase consumer satisfaction, loyalty, and conversion rates. A thorough UX audit can assist you in identifying and addressing areas of concern before they turn into costly issues.
We can also assist you if you are unsure where to begin or require assistance in getting started.
Learn more about our UX audit services.
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