Beginner’s Guide to UX Audits: UsabilityGeek guestpost

User experience audits boost usability, reveal hidden user trends and improve digital product ROI. Our lastest UsabilityGeek post reveals how to do a UX audit for better product performance.

Auditing the user experience of a site or app is a solid way to assess the success of a digital product with users. By doing a UX audit, you can find out why users are abandoning shopping carts, for example, or why they’re not signing up for your service, or which part of your app they use time and again. Audits reveal this information through analysis and metrics rather than designer hunches, and should provide product managers with actionable recommendations. And at the end of the day, UX audits aim to boost conversions. In Justinmind‘s most recent post for UsabilityGeek, we bring you a handy guide to UX audits for beginners.

What happens during a UX audit?

A UX audit involves an external or internal auditor using a range of approaches, tools and metrics to analyze where a product is going wrong (or right). Wireframes or prototypes, sales data, customer feedback, usability heuristics and mental modeling, among other techniques, help auditors to judge product performance against established standards and recommend realistic improvements.

Why should you do a UX audit?

While doing a UX audit won’t automatically cure a product’s UX woes, it can answer some essential questions:

• What’s working, and what’s not?
• Which metrics are being collecting and which should be collected?
• What does the data tell you about user needs?
• What has already been tried, and what impact did it have on metrics?

A UX audit enables product designers to form hypotheses about user behavior present and future and, most importantly, an audit brings you closer to increased conversions and ROI once follow-up action is taken.

Who should do a UX audit, and when?

Find out when to plan a UX audit and the steps to carry it out in the original UsabilityGeek post.