UX Audit – How to Drive Conversions in Online Sales? + Case Study
Usability plays a crucial role in the success of digital products. A low conversion rate or a high bounce rate can be signals that a website or mobile app needs a UX audit. Below, we explain what such an audit entails, how it is conducted, and what business benefits it can bring.
The Importance of a UX Audit
You invest hundreds of thousands of PLN in an app designed to dominate the market. Although everything goes according to plan at first, problems eventually arise: new users don’t stick around, and shopping carts are frequently abandoned before checkout. Customer support is overwhelmed, generating extra costs instead of profits. What is going wrong? In most cases, a professional UX audit provides the answer.
How UX Affects Business Results
Nobody needs convincing that UX is important for the success of an online business. Every manager in digital marketing or e-commerce should know this. However, it is worth understanding just how massive a role UX plays in business, as it often has a direct impact on profits and costs. This is best illustrated with examples.
Example 1: Abandoned Carts
One of the biggest problems for online stores is abandoned carts. Customers add products but fail to complete the purchase. The main causes include high shipping costs, a complicated checkout process, or a lack of trust in the website. According to a Baymard Institute study:
- 24% abandon their cart due to a mandatory account creation requirement,
- 18% point to a checkout process that is too long or complicated,
- 17% do not trust the site due to design errors,
- 17% lack immediate information about the total order value,
- 12% experience website errors,
- 7% lack appropriate payment methods.
Every abandoned cart represents a measurable financial loss that can be minimized by improving UX.
Example 2: Overloaded Hotline
A customer service hotline is an essential part of customer support, but its excessive workload generates high costs. According to a McKinsey study, 57% of customer service heads consider reducing call volume a top priority.
Main causes of hotline overload:
- Unclear information on the website,
- Lack of an FAQ section,
- Insufficient communication channels,
- Technical issues with the website or app.
Reducing the number of inquiries through UX improvements can significantly lower operational costs.
Understanding User Psychology as a Foundation
UX issues often stem from a mismatch between the application and user needs and behaviors. Creators may have a clear vision of how an app should work, but users may have different expectations. A professional UX audit helps identify these “friction points” and improves communication between the app and its users.
Types of UX Audits: Narrow and Broad. Which One to Choose?
A UX audit can be conducted in two variants: narrow and broad. A narrow audit focuses on a specific aspect of a website or app’s performance, allowing for a quick and low-cost identification of problems. A broad audit involves a comprehensive analysis of the entire platform, which is more time-consuming but provides a more complete picture of the situation.
Detecting Costly Errors
A UX audit helps detect errors that can impact business results. For example, a UX audit may reveal the need to redesign the transactional process in order to ultimately improve conversion rates.
UX Audit Methods: Heuristic Analysis and Cognitive Walkthrough
The two main methods of a UX audit are heuristic analysis and cognitive walkthrough.
Heuristic analysis involves evaluating a website against heuristics, which are general usability principles. Specific elements of selected views are assessed, most commonly based on Nielsen’s 10 widely used usability heuristics:
- 1. Visibility of system status: Always keep users informed about what is going on through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time.
- 2. Match between system and the real world: Speak the users’ language with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
- 3. User control and freedom: Provide clearly marked “emergency exits” to leave unwanted states without having to go through an extended process.
- 4. Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.
- 5. Error prevention: Even better than good error messages is a careful design that prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.
- 6. Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible.
- 7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators—unseen by the novice user—may often speed up the interaction for the expert user.
- 8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed.
- 9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
- 10. Help and documentation: Even though it’s better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation.
Cognitive walkthrough involves testing the website from the user’s perspective. It determines what processes might take place on the website/app. First, possible user action scenarios are created, and then every action is executed to check all possible processes on the site.
In this method, we focus on two issues:
- Label-following strategy: Assumes that users make choices based on labels that match the task they need to perform (e.g., clicking “Log in” to log into a service).
- The problem-solving process (4 steps):
- Formulation of a goal by the user,
- Searching by the user for possible actions to take,
- Selecting the action that the user believes will allow them to achieve the established goal,
- Executing the chosen action and evaluating the system’s reaction to confirm the achievement of that goal.
What Does a UX Audit Cover?
Drawing on our long-standing experience, the UX audits we conduct for clients include:
- A detailed analysis of navigation, functionality, and the structure of the website/mobile app.
- A review of content layout and graphic design.
- Usability testing aimed at assessing ease of use and intuitiveness.
- Evaluation of responsiveness and adaptation to various devices.
- Analysis of user interactions with key elements.
- Identification of areas where the user experience can be improved.
- Practical recommendations for changes backed by examples.
We wrote more about UX audits in this article: “Increase Sales in Your Online Store Thanks to UX/UI”
What does this look like in practice? Check out our sample case study with a link to the full audit! 👇
Summary
UX optimization translates to improved conversion rates and increased revenue. If you want to verify your tool for usability and improve its efficiency, contact us. We will conduct a UX audit tailored to your business goals.
If you are ready and want to find out right now what is not working on your website or app and why—we will be happy to conduct a detailed, comprehensive UX/UI audit for you and present our recommendations.
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