If you want to transform your website, you need to think like a revolutionary. Like Che Guevara, you need to truly understand your audience – step into their shoes and see what makes them happy or – more importantly – what makes them unhappy.
And a User Experience audit can help you do this. An audit gives you the knowledge and insight about how your customers interact with your site now, what they like, and what’s not working for them. You can then use this to make changes that will make your customers happy and therefore move your business forward.
It’s similar to the process many revolutionaries go through. When you want to cause a dramatic change, you need to understand your audience and once you’ve done this you have the insight you need to make a transformation. With knowledge you have the motivation to make bold, confident and liberating decisions.
Much like the revolutionary Che Guevara, you have to spend your time understanding how your audience operates, what your audience wants to do and what will make them happy, before you decide to make a drastic change.
Che Guevara was somewhat of a people’s scholar. Known for being an advocate for the common people, he’s famous for getting out there and hauling bags of sugar to show he understood and empathised with his people. He could step into their shoes. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to believe that communism is what the people wanted and needed – no more poverty. It would simply make the people happy – that was his intent and, among other things, his motivation.
Once you get into your customers shoes, much like the Argentine Marxist revolutionary did, you can truly understand and empathise with them – helping to ensure you will create a digital product that people want and need.
Gaining knowledge and insight about what your audience want, can give you the influence you need to make a change. Finding out what is working for your customers now, or more what is not working, is the true value of a UX audit.
What does a UX audit do?
A User Experience Audit is a way of researching and analysing your digital products (apps, websites, CRM software etc) to identify areas that need improvement to better enhance the experience for your customers.
Audits uncover areas that could be causing headaches or grief for your users, such as a question in a form that stops customers going any further, a piece of content that is hard to understand or is confusing, or a link that is going to the wrong place. They look at various things, such as what’s working, what’s not, what metrics or data is collected and what should be collected, how easy is it for people to do what they want to do, what areas are causing headaches for people, and what do users want to do that they can’t do?
Why is it so important to do a UX audit?
I’m sure any revolutionary would tell you that the first step in any major project is to understand your audience – get your facts straight and do your research.
However, I’d say Che Guevara would go one step further and say you need to truly understand your audience before you can bring about a change for the better. Understanding your customers helps you to see things from their perspective helping you to empathise with them, and therefore create a product that will make them happy.
In the digital design world, a UX audit is this first step. It lets you figure out what issues your customers have and what you need to change – giving you the capability to make insightful decisions. It enables you to see how your digital products are used by your customers, what’s missing, and what opportunities you have for improvement.
For example, you can discover why conversions are low or how to enhance on-boarding. In the current market, providing people with a product that they not only want and also making it a great user experience awesome, will set you apart from your competitors.
UX audits give you the ammunition you need to create short and long term strategies to transform your digital products and, inevitably, improve user experience, increase traffic, enhance sales and make your customers happy.
If you’re looking to make a fundamental change to your digital products you want to make sure you have them examined by a UX professional. Getting a critical and trained eye to audit your site, not only ensures that you get an honest and real view, but you will get a comprehensive list of areas that could be improved to better enhance the customer experience.
Having an external team do your audit also helps with objectivity, as they are not necessarily historically or emotionally connected to the products, which means they also might spot things that you may have missed.
What are the benefits of a UX audit?
Gaining knowledge about your customers is invaluable, and being able to step into their shoes, much like Che Guevara, is even more powerful.
Here are some of the more common benefits of doing a UX audit.
Understanding your customers – Knowledge and insight about the user experience your customers are having can give you a clearer understanding of who is using your product and how. This will help you see things from their perspective, allowing you have empathy for your customers and therefore begin to design things with the customer in mind.
Knowledge to make confident decisions – An audit can help you figure out what issues you are facing into and what you need to change – giving you the knowledge to make insightful decisions.s.
Actionable changes – The information gathered coupled with recommendations from a UX practitioner, will gives you the learnings to make authoritative future design decisions. And what’s even more powerful, is that these takeaways are based on empirical evidence, not hunches or assumptions.
Baseline of metrics – An audit will provide you with metrics that can be used as a baseline, and should be reviewed again once changes have been made. These metrics help to form hypotheses about why users act in certain ways and how they might behave in the future.
Amazing ROI -The ROI of user experience is unprecedented, and auditing to find out what areas need to be improved on, is the start of the process to an increased bottomline. Improving your UX will help increase traffic and boost conversions.
Who will benefit from a UX audit?
Most businesses can benefit from a UX audit, but these four situations make it more a deal breaker:
- Companies without a dedicated UX team – These types of companies stand to benefit most from a UX audit, as those with an in-house team will most likely already have been evaluating their digital products and tweaking the user experience along the way.
- Companies wanting to redesign something – If you want to make major change, doing a UX audit before you start is a great way to get the information and insight you need to put strategic plans in place.
- Companies who are experiencing issues with their digital products – In some cases, you may already be aware of a problem that exists, but you don’t know where it stems from or how to fix it. A UX audit can uncover some of these problems for you and a UX practitioner can provide recommendations on how to solve these.
- Companies who already have a product – If your website or app has already been live for some time, a UX audit is a great way to see how things are going and what you may need to tweak. You can spot the friction points that users are currently experiencing, and get the know how to addressing any headaches and move forward.
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1 Comment
you have a cool writing style, this is the first time I am reading an audit article with such creative! I want to add the following quote: User Experience Auditing is a smart solution for those who see a risk in global design changes. If your site has a number of problems, but it still brings some profit, there is a fear of changing it or completely changing the design. In this case, it is more advisable to gradually solve critical problems identified in the UX audit process than to completely change the site. You can read the full article here.