A great-looking website isn’t enough to succeed online. Users must be able to navigate it your site efficiently if you want to attract and retain their attention.
That’s where a user experience (UX) audit comes in. A UX audit will help you uncover opportunities for improvement, create a smoother user journey and drive marketing and business results.
It’s a structured evaluation of what people may experience when using your website. The goal is to identify where users may encounter friction, confusion and obstacles to achieving their goals.
A well-executed UX audit can reveal gaps in navigation, unclear calls-to-action and accessibility issues that could prevent users from moving through the buying cycle. Pinpointing those issues allows you to make strategic improvements that can increase customer satisfaction and boost conversion rates.
The benefits of a UX audit include:
Before diving into a UX audit, it’s important to know what you’d like to achieve.
Do you want to increase conversions, improve accessibility or reduce drop-offs in the checkout process? Having well-defined goals helps you align your efforts with business objectives and user expectations.
When you establish measurable goals, you can tailor your findings into actionable recommendations. That makes it easier to communicate results to stakeholders and prioritize improvements effectively.
Data is the foundation of any UX audit. By examining analytics, you can uncover how users move through your site and where they lose interest. Those insights provide evidence to support necessary changes.
For example, high bounce rates on a landing page may indicate confusing messaging or poor visual hierarchy. Using a heatmap tool reveals where users focus their attention or why they ignore CTAs.
Here are some tips for gathering data:
Once you’ve identified user behavior patterns, it’s important to compare your website against established UX/UI best practices. That allows you to align your site with tried-and-true design principles for usability and accessibility. Use frameworks like usability heuristics and accessibility standards to identify issues that may not appear in analytics.
Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics are widely recognized as a cornerstone of UX design. Including them in your audit provides a structured lens through which you can evaluate the intuitiveness of your website.
They include:
Accessibility is a vital component of UX. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, is the current legal and industry standard for web accessibility. Referencing WCAG in your audit helps keep your site compliant and accessible for users with disabilities. That allows you to expand your audience reach and reduce legal ramifications. Following WCAG also improves overall usability, since accessible design benefits all users.
Analytics can tell you what users are doing, but testing and interviewing people in person will reveal why they behave the way they do. By observing individuals interacting with your website, you gain direct insights into pain points, usability gaps and unmet expectations. Interview users to reveal and understand the motivations, emotions and frustrations that numbers and statistics alone can’t show.
Testing methods include:
After you’ve gathered your data and made your observations, organize your findings into patterns and themes. Grouping issues by severity and frequency makes it easier to prioritize adjustments that will produce the biggest impact.
You can create a list of actionable recommendations based on your goals. A well-documented report with detailed steps allows stakeholders to see how you plan to address UX issues. For example, if you want to improve conversions, you may recommend altering CTA placement and checkout navigation.
Regular audits and ongoing adjustments keep your website competitive, user-friendly and aligned with industry best practices. At TouchStone Digital, our UI/ UX audits are designed to uncover usability barriers and deliver actionable insights to drive measurable results. Whether you need a comprehensive audit or a targeted review, we can tailor our approach to enhance your website performance. Get in touch to schedule a consultation.
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