How to conduct UX audit for website
Importance of UX Audits for Websites
UX audit on a website is important because it identifies usability issues on your website. Most people and most e-commerce stores and websites don’t understand the impact of usability issues. Usability issues, if not corrected, impact cart abandonment and your overall website customer experience. For example, let’s say you want someone to come to your website and register for your email marketing or something like that. If you’re not doing usability testing to identify all the funnel flows and look at how existing customers are performing or behaving on your website, you’re losing a lot of traffic and potential conversion.
Some people argue that you can use conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to identify those problems.
You need to understand that CRO, in the context of AB testing, is a subset of user experience. So, you just can’t get as much success with CRO AB testing as you would get conducting usability testing, or conducting a UX audit. So, UX audits are extremely important and it’s something that a lot of e-commerce brands fail to do. You have situations where you have a UX team and an A/B testing team (C team) in an organisation that don’t talk to each other. And you have instances where the UX team and the C team are combined together, they’re one single team so you have people that have the UX skills and CRO skills. I’m talking about real-life experience here. So, usability audits or UX audits should be more important in my opinion than AB testing. That’s just my personal opinion.
Conducting a Website UX Audit
How do you conduct a website UX audit?
Based on website redesign projects that I’ve worked on in the past, there’s no one standard way of doing a UX audit. It’s not like there’s a sequence you have to follow, but there are certain important elements that you need to look at depending on who is conducting the UX audit, if you have an in-house UX team or you hire an external agency.