You are not satisfied with how your product is performing? What's worse, you don't know the reasons? What if instead of simply wondering about it you could analyse data and find out, based on solid facts, what has to be done to amend the situation? This is when UX Audit comes in handy. Learn about user experience review, when to conduct it and what can you gain from it.

What are the premises of a UX Audit?

UX Audit is an expert assessment designed to check how your product is performing in terms of usability and user experience. It allows to examine and rate software products, which enables stakeholders to see what requires improvement . UX Audit usually consists of four phases — we named them: exploratory research, deep analysis, actionable recommendations and action plan.

Exploratory Research
The aim of this phase is to learn more about your product, both in terms of its challenges and your business goals. We gather and analyse relevant materials, metrics and user data. It helps us understand your business, customers and leads to effective cooperation. During this stage, we also gather info from product owner, product team, customer service, customer success and other departments that may be concerned with this usability issues in order to determine problems, collect user requests, errors etc.

Deep Analysis
At this stage we turn data into insights by leveraging Google Analytics, Hotjar and other analytics tools. We also conduct market research to better understand specific character of your line of business and to find competitive solutions.

Simultaneously we perform a cognitive product walk-through to see things from a customer’s perspective. It allows finding any obstacles that your users are facing and spot missed opportunities to grow your product. Each problem and opportunity is prioritised based on its importance and your goals.

Actionable Recommendation
Finally, we turn insights into data-driven recommendations for UX improvements. The goal of the UX Audit report is to provide you with highly actionable solutions that address each problem we find as well as with recommendations concerning the relevance and value proposition of your mobile or web app.

Action Plan
We recommend next steps and provide you with a roadmap for improvements that will allow your product to reach its full potential. This enables you to smoothly advance to product redesign and development stages, which we'll be happy to help you with.

Who should consider a UX Audit?

UX Audit is performed to help product owners, founders and marketers detect errors that they cannot perceive without it, due to being too involved with the product.

• Product Owners that want to identify and fix problems that occur in the user interface
• Marketers, that seek ways to improve campaign conversion and wonder if the product properly plays its role in the customer journey.
• Founders that have access to the prototype and want to identify errors before moving to the development phase, which is much cheaper than fixing a finished product.

When is the best time to conduct UX Audit?

There is no bad or good time for conducting UX Audit. But you can be sure that before deciding on creating a new product or redesigning an existing one it is important to think of UX issues. When you receive signals that your users are confused when using your product, design is outdated and your revenue is below expectations then you should consider UX Audit.

But when will the audit be most effective? The perfect time to conduct a UX review is the very beginning of product or website redesign. When you should redesign? Frankly, anytime, if you already have access to analytical data and want to use it to improve your product or when you feel that your product does not perform as it's supposed to and you don't know what may be the cause. You wonder why users do not register? Why conversion from trial to paying user is too low and churn rate too high? Users behave in a different way than you expected? Those are clear signs that it's time for a UX Audit!

Benefits of UX Audit

1. You'll redesign your product based on solid data not guessing
Your product shows symptoms mentioned in the previous section but you don't have data to find out what is the cause and how to fix its problems? During our UX Audit we gather all available data at the very beginning and advise you on what tools you should use to gather more useful info. Here is what we take into account: Review of business and user objectives, Conversion metrics, Customer Care data, Sales data, Traffic/Engagement, Compliance with UX standards, Usability Heuristics, Mental Modelling, Wire-framing & Prototyping, UX Best Practices.

2. You'll move in the right direction and gain new product perspective
If you constantly work on a product you start to miss certain bugs or logic flaws, because... you know it too well. The same goes for content — are USP and communication of your product clear to users who see them for the first time? Are you sure you're not using business jargon? Fresh look allows to pick up those flaws and a UX expert can also point you in the right direction. Thanks to our experience with dozens of mobile and web software projects for customers from many different lines of business we've gained a wide perspective on the market and problems that entrepreneurs face every day - see our portfolio. That is why we can help you in almost any situation.

3. You'll compare your product with competitive solutions
Well-conducted competition analysis allows you to define key success factors in your industry, find out what helped its leaders achieve their position, and what made others stay behind. You'll learn from examples what are your weaknesses and strengths when compared to competition, which will help you improve your advantages and eliminate flaws. All this will help you stand out from the crowd and provide unique value. This approach is well described in “Blue Ocean Strategy” book.

If one of your goals is to introduce new, fresh functions, it is worthwhile to broaden the analysis to check how companies in different industries approach similar challenges. Thanks to benchmark analysis we were able to help our customers develop new, better methods of prompting customers to install and use mobile apps, adjust web portals to meet best business standards or solve UX/business process issues.

4. You'll learn how your users behave and get to know them better
During UX Audit we conduct a product cognitive walk-through to get to know it from user's perspective. You'll learn how your product fairs when it comes to achieving user goals, errors encountered by users and compliance with business standards like Nielsen heuristics. This analysis provides qualitative data. We gather quantitative data from tools like: Google Analytics, Hotjar, Firebase or Mixpanel. Besides standard user acquisition channel or web traffic analysis we'll check how users behave when using your product based on heat maps and session recordings. It will all allow you to realise if your product is intuitive and if users behave as you expected.

5. You'll save money on development
If you can't identify the problem, don't design solutions. One of the UX Audit products is a report containing UX improvement roadmap as well as suggestions regarding the value of your software. This improvement plan allows you to smoothly move to the redesign phase, during which you'll prepare only the necessary additions and features and then start the development phase. It helps you avoid making wrong decisions and taking your product in the wrong direction, wasting time and money on costly programming work.

6. You'll increase your profits
By implementing all suggested changes you'll not only reduce costs but also (and mainly) increase profits. By improving your value proposition and communication you'll make users understand your product faster. By finding and eliminating distractions on purchase path you'll increase conversion. By streamlining on-boarding and making a product more intuitive you'll make your customers more satisfied with your product, which will result in higher Net Promoter Score, lower churn rate and increased number of referrals.

Follow-up is the key to a successful product

Thanks a to professional UX Audit you'll find errors that require fixing and discover new ways to increase ROI. But a follow-up is crucial. If you don't implement suggested improvements nothing will change. You feel that your product requires adjustments? Contact us and we'll help you conduct a UX Audit and Product Redesign.