A short guide on UX audit and how it can benefit any software product

UX audit is a professional review and evaluation of a software product’s UX, aimed to identify any types of issues that have a negative impact on the product’s performance and provoke user frustration. Its ultimate goal is to provide recommendations on which areas of the product need to be improved to make it more user-oriented and therefore more useful and profitable for the business. Let’s discuss how to know when the product needs a UX audit, how to prepare for the process as the product owner, which steps the process consists of and what to do with the results. 

When to perform a UX audit?

If the product functions properly, performs all its goals and the user retention score stays high, it probably doesn’t need a UX audit right now. On the contrary, some of the situations require a thorough and sometimes even an urgent audit. For example:

• The product has been on the market for a few years already and you need to access whether it’s still relevant or outdated;

• The product has been redesigned recently and you want to evaluate its new design/features;

• The product has been receiving negative feedback lately and you can’t find out what exactly is going wrong;

• The product was designed by several teams without general guidelines, and it needs to be polished;

• The product is too heavy and complex and needs to be structured and decluttered;

• You feel something is off-key with the product, but can’t tell exactly what. 

How to prepare for a UX audit? 

To make sure the UX audit fulfills your specific goals and meets your requirements, do the following when communicating with the audit team:

• Clearly define your request: articulate the exact issues going on with the product, decide whether you want to analyse only certain parts of the product or everything as a whole and state your expectations from the process;

• Prepare all the necessary information on the product, including up-to-date analytics, to help the team identify pain points faster;

• Share your vision on how the product should evolve to fulfill your business goals. This will help make the audit more personalized and tailored to your needs. 

Which steps does a typical UX audit consist of? 

Each UX audit team has their own approach to conducting the process, which might also depend on factors like the type of the product in question or peculiarities of the client’s request, but the following steps are the core of a typical UX audit:

• Preparation talk with the client. To start a UX audit, the team holds a meeting with the client to discuss concerns about the product and define goals of the upcoming process;

• Overall evaluation. The teams studies the product, gathers all the important data and looks at the product’s competitors to compare the product’s performance against the industry’s standards;

• UI/UX testing. The team conducts a thorough evaluation of all parts of the product from different perspectives and performs usability tests to identify issues and pain points, as well as studies user behavior patterns to evaluate how users interact with the product;

• Data analysis. After performing all the tests and documenting all the results, the team holds sessions to analyse all the collected data to identify core issues;

• Report compilation. All the data, conclusions, recommendations and any other information is compiled by the team in the report;

• Discussion with the client. The audit team presents the report to the client and discusses it in detail, sharing their vision and recommendations  on how to improve the product’s usability. 

What to do after a UX audit? 

UX audit can highlight issues that halt your product’s success, but finding ways to solve them is a separate task. After receiving UX audit report, we recommend doing the following:

• Hold a meeting with your team to discuss the results and findings of the past audit, study the identified issues and decide which of them have more impact on user experience and require urgent improvement;

• Study your product roadmap to see which urgent issues can be solved organically through planned activities and which have to be addressed separately and require any extra resources;

• Perform the actual work on solving those issues and update the product;

• Monitor your product metrics after the update, and in case they don’t improve with time, seek an extra consultation with the audit team. 

How does the product/business benefit from a UX audit? 

A well-done UX plays a great role in delivering positive experience and making business prosper. Poor UX, on the contrary, can lead to critical issues like sales recession, which damages the brand image and leads to monetary losses. Here is how UX audit can help your product and business avoid those losses:

• The product gets easier navigation and more seamless user interface, which reduces user frustration and positively impacts customer satisfaction;

• All unnecessary parts of the product and unnecessary development works they required get cut off, which allows to save budget and efforts and shift focus on what really matters;

• By studying the industry and the product’s competitors, UX audit reveals user needs and expectations precisely, helping to get rid of the wrong assumptions and provide better service;

• Overall positive changes boost customer retention and conversion rates. 

When not to do a UX audit?

Despite all the positive impact a UX audit can have on a software product and the fact that every product eventually needs it, it is still reasonable to choose the right time for this process in each particular case, as performing it without reason or prematurely won’t lead to the desired results. You most likely don’t need an audit right now if:

• Your product has been released just recently and there is not enough feedback and analytics data to study yet, meaning there are no certain issues to solve;

• Your product is relatively small (i.e. a landing page or a small app with just a couple screens). In case such products stumble upon any issues, it is usually enough to address the current issue separately and see if it fixes the situation rather than spending budget on a major audit;

• Your product doesn’t have any major issues, gets positive feedback, has a high level of user retention and conversion rates. Even though UX audit can be performed for preventative purposes, it is still better to conduct it when there are certain issues to address. 

Conclusion

UX audit is an effective way to help a software product retrieve its fullest potential when it gets stuck in a series of issues that inhibit its performance. Performed by an external team, it allows us to evaluate the product impartially from an outside perspective, scrupulously examining all its parts and finding out its pain points. UX audit doesn’t improve the product or solve any issues, but rather gives insight on what there is to improve in order to provide a better user experience and make the product serve your brand recognition and profitability.