Top 5 Ways A UX Audit Can Boost Your RoI

Let’s begin with getting the basics out of the way – what is a UX Audit?

Simply put, a UX Audit is an expert assessment of your product’s performance in terms of usability and user experience. There’s a UX audit checklist that covers the whole process of examining and rating the existing user journeys. This examination is what reveals actionable areas of improvement for your product.

Businesses, as well as digital needs, evolve over time. And, this may sometimes cause the product to fall short of expectations, even if it was made to fulfill them during its launch. How can business owners know that the product isn’t living up to its task? There are some telltale signs with the system such as –

• Lacking standard features.
• Struggling to cope with scaling and diversification.
• Struggling to integrate with other systems.
• Compelling users to devise workarounds.
• Causing productivity to take a hit.
• Causing customer numbers to decline.

While the signs that your product needs a UX audit can be apparent, it is actually difficult to understand the true reasons why they arise. For instance, burnout in healthcare providers had been making headlines in the healthcare industry for years. But, it was only upon analyzing their workday was it discovered that the complex functioning of the EHR system they used was to be blamed. Physicians spent all their spare time adding notes and data into the EHR – a system with a host of usability issues.

And therein lies the value of a UX audit. As a product owner, it helps you evaluate where your system stands, and the reasons why it falls short of fulfilling expectations.

Here are 5 ways in which a UX audit can boost your RoI

It assesses product capability based on the business and its goals

A UX audit is conducted by a team of evaluation experts. They make use of a host of approaches, metrics, and comparisons to assess the capability of your product. So, what is it that actually goes on during an audit exercise?

Keeping your business goals and your product performance expectations as a baseline, the UX audit –

• Defines typical users including their persona, needs, and goals.
• Establishes the specific problem your digital products solves and how it does that.
• Reviews existing user stories and feedback to capture lags and pain points.
• Conducts user observations, stakeholder interviews to understand how they interact with the system.
• Evaluates its performance based on responsiveness, usability, navigation, clarity, and more.

It provides actionable areas of improvement

The UX Audit involves examining the existing user journeys to reveal actionable areas of improvement. The UX audit report contains detailed suggestions based on a comprehensive study of business goals, user journeys, heuristic evaluation based on the actual usage of the product. It contains advice on making your UX a pleasure to use including speed, responsiveness, navigation, and more. It prioritizes improvements based on your business specifics, so they’re tailored to suit your needs, based on parameters such as speed, responsiveness, navigation, and more. Here’s what a sample UX audit report looks like.

Improvements guided by data, rather than guesswork

The UX audit report provides valuable insights on making rapid changes that aren’t arbitrary but are based on hard data and analytics.

Recreating workflows and mapping user journeys help in revealing actual pain points – points that often are a revelation to even product owners. And, it doesn’t end there – the product knowledge is then analyzed alongside the business requirements to set an improvement plan that is focused and caters to needs.

There’s also a roadmap of future improvements

The UX audit provides a prioritized list of improvements. This list covers both, immediate remedial measures, along with additional metrics and feedback you can use to align future improvements. These could be time-consuming workflows, confusing interactions, or any pain points bogging your system down – and achieve maximum RoI. Thus, it enables you to make informed decisions about ensuring product performance in the long run.

This is what you’ll get to see

By now you’ve had a fair idea of the transformative potential of a UX audit. But what would the results translate into in terms of RoI? Here’s what you can expect over time, once the recommendations are applied –

• Your product will have a more natural and intuitive flow, which would make for smooth navigation. Users would be able to accomplish their intended actions with ease. Think of products like Salesforce, Slack, or Zoho with their smooth, intuitive interactions.
• You will have a better understanding of user needs, their pain points, which will enable you to improve the experience for them. In terms of customer experience, this knowledge is a definitive business edge.

Overall, the UX audit exercise will help you fix the problems in your workflows efficiently, increase retention, boost sales, and create a system your users will love.

The costs of persisting with a poorly designed product can be astounding. A UX audit is budget-friendly and time-bound, which makes it the perfect method to understand and resolve usability issues. Have any questions around the UX audit? Let us know in the comments below and we will get back to you!

Overall, the UX audit exercise will help you fix the problems in your workflows efficiently, increase retention, boost sales, and create a system your users will love.