Six Signs Your Enterprise Application Needs a UX Audit
Research conducted by Forrester indicates that investing just one dollar in UX can yield a return of 100 dollars, equating to an impressive ROI of 9,900 percent.
With compelling statistical evidence showcasing the efficiency of UX improvement efforts being released year after year, it’s a no-brainer for businesses to prioritize meeting their customers’ needs and desires in today’s cut-throat digital landscape.
Yet, many companies still face difficulties in identifying the ideal timing for implementing UX-focused development or redesign initiatives for their digital products.
In this article, we will outline the importance of a UX audit for your business. We will provide six signs indicating your product needs such an audit and advice on the initial preparation steps you must have set in place before launching such an initiative.
What is a UX Audit?
A UX audit is a meticulous evaluation process that assesses a digital product to ensure it meets the essential requirements of user experience, accessibility, and business. Its primary purpose is to identify prevailing issues, such as reduced retention and conversion rates. Ultimately, a UX audit helps an organization establish a roadmap for improving its UX design.
The most significant benefit of conducting a UX audit is that it provides a profound understanding of your clients, subsequently impacting all business decisions, from UX design to the products or services you provide, in a positive way.
Benefits of a UX Audit
A UX audit can bring a plethora of benefits to your business. The following are the most crucial.
Product redesign based on hard data rather than guesswork
Any UX audit process starts with collecting all available data about the product. This involves analyzing business and user goals, conversion rates, customer service and sales data, traffic and engagement metrics, compliance with UX standards and usability heuristics, mental modeling, wireframing, prototyping, and UX best practices.
Guiding product enhancements in the right direction
When working on a product for a long time, it becomes easy to miss bugs or logical flaws, and it may be difficult to determine if your content is clear to first-time users or if you’re using too much technical language.
A UX audit helps identify these issues and provides a fresh perspective to guide product development in the right direction.
Providing unique value to your customers
By conducting a thorough analysis of your competitors, you gain valuable insights into the key success factors of your industry. This includes understanding the strategies that have helped leaders rise to the top, as well as the pitfalls that have caused others to fall behind.
By comparing your product with those of your competitors, you can identify your strengths and weaknesses and provide unique value to your customers. To take this a step further, it’s important to benchmark against companies outside of your industry to gain a fresh perspective on how they are tackling similar challenges.
Taking a deeper dive into your users’ experience
During a UX audit, you can gain insight into how users interact with your product. By evaluating how well your product meets user goals, the frequency of user errors, collecting quantitative data, as well as analyzing user behavior through heat maps and session recordings, you can determine whether your product is intuitive and whether users are behaving as expected.
Saving money on development
A proper UX audit report typically includes a roadmap for improving UX and recommendations for optimizing your software’s value proposition. By following this plan, you can avoid costly mistakes and develop only the necessary features and additions. This approach can save you significant time and money in the development process.
Increased profits
Improving your value proposition and communication can help users understand your product more quickly. Eliminating distractions on the path to purchase can increase conversions. Simplifying onboarding and improving the product’s intuitiveness can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, lower the churn rate, and lead to more referrals, resulting in increased profits.
Enterprise Application needs a ux audit
The performance of your system may be significantly impacted by various factors, such as technology, architecture, and design. As a product owner, you can identify the following signs of poor UX to evaluate the health of your system:
Your product logic has multiple inconsistencies
If you’re facing challenges when incorporating new features and your product logic has inconsistencies, it suggests that your system requires an update and a thorough UX audit.
Your users have to come up with workarounds
When users are forced to modify their processes to accommodate system inflexibility, it indicates that your software is limited or outdated. Workarounds can lead to reduced business productivity and manual errors.
Your system misses standard features
Over time, features that were once considered innovative become industry standards. If your system lacks these features, it may be at risk of functional obsolescence. Outdated systems can also pose security risks.
Your users have issues understanding the main features
If users are required to refer to the documentation or seek support for basic tasks, it is a sign that your application needs improvement. Investing in fixing major UI/UX issues can save time and resources in the long run.
Your system is struggling to keep up with scaling and diversification
As companies adapt to their changing goals and objectives, their software systems must also adapt to meet the new requirements. Outdated UI systems can struggle to keep up with increased demand and may require modernization.
Your product is difficult to integrate with other systems
Full software integration is key to increasing the efficiency of business processes. If your system lacks integration with other software, it could result in inefficiencies and increased manual work.
If you find inconsistencies in your product logic or have difficulty adding new features, it’s time for a UX audit to improve the performance of your system.
How do I prepare for a UX Audit?
Any UX audit requires proper preparation. Take some time to create a blueprint of your UX audit initiative. This may include the following steps:
- To ensure your upcoming UX audit’s success, define your expectations and tie your objectives to conversions, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Without clear goals, the audit will be merely subjective.
- Try to understand your users’ requirements and objectives. Creating user personas can help you gain a clear understanding of their behavior and demographics, as well as where they’re coming from. It’s also important to verify if your targeted audience matches your actual users to avoid surprises.
- Make sure that your product data and analytics are up-to-date. Gather data and compile analytics before conducting a UX audit to get a more accurate result. This could include information such as click tracking or heat maps. This step will assist UX auditors in determining how users interact with your product and whether any modifications are required to meet their needs.
- Perform heuristic evaluations to assess the usability of your product and determine if it’s user-friendly. Compile the results into a report and provide recommendations for improving your site. Conducting a UX audit will help determine if your current efforts are effective.
- If you’ve had a UX assessment in the past, be sure to create a report with the results and changes from any previous UX reviews of your digital product. Other important information to consider including is deliverables, deadlines, constraints on the audit, and information related to stakeholders.
To sum it up
We’ve outlined the importance of a UX audit for your enterprise application, provided six signs indicating your product needs such an audit, and suggested the initial preparation steps you must have set in place before launching a UX audit initiative.
In conclusion, a UX audit can be essential in enhancing user experience, increasing customer satisfaction, and ultimately boosting business success. By identifying the six signs of poor UX, companies can evaluate the health of their system and decide if their business is in need of such health checks.
Don’t know where to start in your UX re-evaluation process? Contact Kanda for help. Whether your company needs a full-scale UX audit or just a usability test, we can provide you with the necessary expertise and support to achieve your UX goals.
Talk to our experts today!