DIY: Simple Ways to Audit Your Website User Experience
DIY: Simple Ways to Audit Your Website User Experience
When entering your website, users should feel comfortable, feel special, and feel that they’re important to your business. That is why you should find ways to encourage visitors and potential customers to keep on visiting your website and create a positive impact on your brand.
One way to do this is by having a website user experience audit. It can help you determine if visitors are likely to spend some time on your site or not.
Are you intimidated by the website auditing process? Do not worry! We can help you audit your business’ website and make it more effective in achieving your goals.
If your website isn’t performing the way it used to, you must now invest in a UX audit. A UX audit can help you pinpoint or determine less-than-perfect areas of your website that cause issues for users. It will help you eliminate these issues and improve the user experience.
A UX audit will provide you with information to help you make informed decisions about what you need to do to fix your website’s issues. Here are some of the questions you should consider:
- Where do users get stuck on your website?
- Where are they falling off?
- Why are they dropping off?
- What are the things they do not understand?
There are some other questions that you need to consider, especially those that depend on your audit goals.
What Is User Experience (UX)?
A user experience (UX) refers to the quality of the user’s interaction, experience, and perception of a website or service. In this case, it evaluates how smoothly a user can act upon the intentions of your website. With that, companies go to great lengths to create websites that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users.
That is why the intention of your website should be crystal clear on how it will present your services and purchase options to visitors without hassle. It should effectively lay out a clear customer pathway to enhance their experience.
Importance of User Experience
Here are some of the reasons you should invest in a UX website audit:
- It will keep users on your site longer. A great UX can motivate users to browse your content, read more about your company, hire your services, or buy your products.
- A great user experience provides a platform for news to travel fast, so you should do all you can to leave a positive user experience.
- A superb website UX experience can prevent your visitors from leaving your site and potentially finding your competitors’ websites.
- It will help you increase credibility and help you sell more of your services or products.
- A website user experience can enhance metrics that Google uses to determine how to rank your website in different search engines.
When to Do a UX Audit?
Many small businesses often think about user experience audits after getting negative feedback from their website users. But this should not be the case. Always have a UX website audit before or after business growth.
A website UX audit can help you understand how your customers are engaging after the launch of your website. It is also a great tool to help you determine which approach your business should follow to increase revenue. This way, you make sure your business goals align with the goals of your users.
Website User Experience Aspects That You Should Pay Attention To
Here are some of the aspects that users in a user experience session are paying attention to:
- Website’s Conciseness. Your website should help users quickly find what they want or what they are looking for with fewer clicks and scrolls to avoid hassles. So, make sure your website is concise to be more effective. It can help you capture people’s attention with push notifications. Consider putting a compelling call to action. You may also consider having multi-step conversions, and numerous pages may not be suitable for your site since most consumers will see it as complicated and wasteful.
- Website’s Site Performance, Speed, and Loading Time. In this ever-changing world, every person wants fast service. That is why your website should be fast loading to avoid frustrating your users and visitors. Exceptional web page performance and loading speed are crucial to keeping visitors on your website longer. According to Invision, businesses may lose $2.2 billion per month due to the website’s slow loading speeds. You can try various processes to help your website’s loading speed quicker. This may include reducing image file sizes and minimizing code or script. You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to analyze your website’s performance. This tool may also give you some suggestions to increase the load speed.
- Modern Design and Appearance. Have a clean, well-designed website to help your web users navigate your information more easily. You can research more modern designs, colors, and other design aspects to improve the reading experience of your site. Make sure to incorporate your business brand’s identity.
- Website Accessibility. Web user accessibility is another factor that you should think about. Make sure more people can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with your website trouble-free. Stay conscious of specific accommodations so that web users, especially those with those disabilities, can navigate your site easily.
- Personalization for Your Target Audience. When designing your website’s UX, know your target audience. Research your target audience and understand the most effective ways to communicate with them. Check who your target audience is based on their age, gender, income, location, interests, or a myriad of other factors. These can be men, women, teenagers, or children. Understand your primary targets so you can direct your marketing resources and brand message to them more effectively.
In short, here is the summary of what you need to consider on your website:
- Have a precise solution to convert curious visitors to loyal customers.
- Have the right amount of call-to-action buttons on your site to compel visitors to take an action.
- Put clear indications of who your target audience is. Appropriate messaging or visualization to connect with them.
- Improve your load speed so that it can be less than or around two seconds.
What Does a UX Audit Entail?
Here are some of the methods and materials a website UX Audit entails:
- Business Goals
At the earliest stages of the website UX audit, you must first understand what your business goals and objectives are to create a list of actionable recommendations and improvements. Goals and objectives should be around sales, revenue, conversions, and customer satisfaction. Conduct interviews with employees to help designers learn various insights from those at the business who utilize the website. From the CEO to customer service representatives, conduct these interviews.
- User Interviews and Surveys
Aside from collecting opinions from your employees, you should also conduct website user interviews to learn more about the user experience of your website.
Make sure to collect this kind of information from your customers so that you can analyze this information during a UX audit. Conduct surveys where users can provide their thoughts about different parts of the experience and the website.
- Usability Heuristic Evaluation
Usability heuristics are general principles used in interactive design to ensure usability and identify problems and possible solutions to make a website work for users. Without following these established guidelines, the user experience will suffer. You can check Jakob Nielsen’s ten general principles for interaction design to become more familiar with heuristic evaluations. These evaluations can help determine where usability problems exist.
- User Analytics
User analytics tools like Google Analytics can help evaluate the traffic to their website. They can provide you with a piece of valuable quantitative information about how many users visit your website over time. User analytics check user analysis and dive into deeper insights than a website can provide on its own. It combines customer behavior data with profile and persona attributes.
How to Conduct a UX Audit
We have outlined the general steps that you should include in a UX audit. You can scale these steps up or down depending on the time and budget you allotted to the project.
1. Understand your business objectives.
The first step you should do in conducting a UX audit is understanding your business objectives for the audited website. As mentioned previously, you can do this by sending out a quick survey to stakeholders, product managers, developers, marketers, and customer service representatives. Make sure to include questions that will help you determine what the website should do to improve the business and get insight into your customers’ pain points and frustrations with your website. After knowing the main business objective, we drill down the process and relate them to your website.
2. Get to know your users.
At the center of user experience is the user. So, the next step you should do in a UX audit is to know your users. Understanding who they are and what they want can help you connect with them more and address their frustrations more effectively. Understanding who they are and what they want can help you connect with them more and address their frustrations more effectively. Each user is different. They will have different backgrounds, problems, and goals. That is why your website should be able to accommodate each of them.
You can create user personas so you can better understand your customers. You may also gather surveys or other points of contact with your customers.
3. Understand user flows.
By collecting user insights, you can create user flows. The user flow, or customer funnel, will help you establish users’ objectives in different parts of the website. The customer funnel can help you describe the steps they’ll take to get there and evaluate the steps they take to complete them.
4. Review analytics.
After knowing your business goals and the user goals and journey, we can start reviewing analytics from search, social, and any other relevant traffic source. This is to determine quantitative data about who’s interacting with your website and what they’re doing while they’re there.
5. Conduct competitor analysis.
Another step you should take is to have a comprehensive competitor analysis of your direct and non-direct competitors. This will help you identify trends and patterns across different websites and how each of them applies its own solution to the same challenges you have.
6. Review your website design.
Review any inconsistencies or improvements in the visual design of your website. A good design should help your users navigate and complete their goals easily.
Make sure your design incorporates these elements:
- Clear and identifiable logo and brand name
- Website colors, textures, and imagery represent your brand
- Have an enough white space
- Clear visual hierarchy of the headings and body text
- Enough buttons and other calls-to-action (CTA) elements
- Well-structured and intuitive forms
- Visual design, colors, textures, and fonts are aligned with your brand
- Website design responsiveness across multiple devices
7. Evaluate website accessibility and performance.
Look at the speeds and performance of your website. Make sure your checkout process is fast, and your product pages load quickly to avoid losing customers to your competitors. There are a few tools you can use to gain insight into what to improve on your website. You can use a Content Network Delivery (CDN) like Cloudflare or Google PageSpeed Insights.
8. Compile findings and make your recommendations.
The final stage of the UX audit is compiling the findings and making recommendations to the client or wider team. Once you have gathered all the data, you should analyze how visitors use your website and where they run into difficulties.
Conclusion
Websites are complex beasts and issues arise all the time. With a website user experience audit, you can dig deeper and audit your site for more user experience issues.
If you need more information on how your website can be improved and achieve increased user satisfaction and ROI, read our other blogs.
