Did you know that only 1% of users say ecommerce websites meet their expectations on every visit? Many business owners often ask themselves how to help users navigate their stores more effectively without missing opportunities to increase conversions at the same time.
But great news: a website UI user experience audit can help you! We’ve gathered all the necessary information for you to understand the process, including audits, UX research, data gathering, and other essential aspects. Let’s dive into how to conduct a UX audit and its best practices.
Table of Contents:
What is a UX audit?
When should you do a UX audit?
What problems does a UX audit solve?
What data do you need to conduct a UX audit?
UX Audit Process In Detail
Examples of Successful UX Audit
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What is a UX audit?
A website User Experience (UX) audit comprehensively evaluates an ecommerce store’s usability, design, and overall customer journey. It helps to identify key pain points that hinder users from completing actions such as purchasing, signing up for a newsletter, or engaging with the brand.
A poor user experience directly affects conversions, revenue, and customer satisfaction. If users struggle to find products, face issues during the checkout process, or encounter confusing design elements, they are likely to leave the site without making a purchase.
The primary purpose of a UX audit is to identify usability barriers and provide actionable insights for improvement. This process optimizes conversion rates, makes the store more accessible, boosts user retention, and keeps the store’s design focused on business objectives.
Companies can pinpoint all the challenges by conducting a UX audit and implementing visual design elements, which can lead to better performance, increased sales, and a more positive user experience.
When should you do a UX audit?
According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), 32% of customers would leave a brand they like if they had one bad experience with the website. When UX audits are performed regularly, they help retain regular customers, boost conversion rates, and bring more organic traffic.
If you don’t have a UX team in your company, it’s better to conduct audits constantly. Here are the signs that you need to take an audit for your ecommerce store:
- drop in user engagement or satisfaction metrics
- launching a major update, a new product, or before big sales (like Black Friday)
- receiving significant user feedback or complaints about usability issues
- before and after rebranding or a considerable change in the product’s visual identity
- changes in industry standards, regulations, or technological advancements
- mobile traffic is growing, but sales are not increasing
- falling competitiveness
“As they say, consistency is the key in many areas, including web design audits. Conducting a website usability audit quarterly is advisable, as users change periodically and platforms or features are updated. Therefore, this task needs continual attention.” – Galina Solopiy, UX/UI Designer, BelVG.
What Problems Of User Behavior Does A UX Audit Solve?
A UX audit addresses several common issues that hinder ecommerce performance and profitability. By identifying and fixing these problems, businesses can create a smoother and more effective customer journey. User pain points a UX audit helps solve include:
- Low Conversion Rates: When users visit the site but leave without making a purchase, a UX audit reveals friction points that prevent conversions.
- Cart Abandonment: Complicated checkout processes, unexpected costs, or trust issues often cause users to abandon their carts.
- Small Cart Engagement Rate: Users browse products but do not add them to the cart, indicating friction in product discovery or trust issues.
- Slow Load Times: Slow websites frustrate users and increase bounce rates, hurting sales and search rankings.
- Trust and Credibility Issues: Poor design, lack of security signals, or inconsistent branding can reduce customer trust.
- Navigation and Search Issues: Confusing menus, broken links, or ineffective search functionality make it harder for users to find what they need, leading to frustration and lost sales.
- High Bounce Rates: Visitors leave quickly without engaging due to poor design, slow performance, or confusing navigation.
- Lack of Interaction: Call-to-action buttons receive little to no clicks, suggesting that the placement, design, or messaging is ineffective.
Resolving these issues can significantly improve a business’s performance. For example, according to Forrester Research, intuitive website UX design can potentially improve conversion rates up to 400%.
What Data Do You Need To Conduct A UX Audit?
To conduct a thorough UX audit, you need to gather data. This information will help to find insights into pain points and business goals. It will also help provide more accurate analysis and actionable recommendations. Key data required for an audit UI/UX includes:
- User Personas and Customer Journey App: Understanding the target audience’s behaviors, needs, and goals helps identify where they encounter friction. Creating user personas will help ux designers provide valuable insights into UX improvements and uncover usability issues.
- Previous UX Auditing: If you have audited user experience before, gather all the UI/UX audit reports as well. It will highlight recurring issues and areas that need further attention.
- Business Goals: Defining clear objectives allows for focusing on metrics and improvements. Understanding business objectives can guide the audit process, helping to prioritize fixes that directly impact revenue, customer retention, and overall performance.
- Analytics: Website analytics reveal user behavior patterns, including bounce rates, time spent on site, and the number of clicks. This information can supplement Google Analytics data, user surveys, search engine rankings, and user flows. Analytics tools like Hotjar can help you identify areas that need improvement.
- Competitor Analysis: Collect data about your competitors in your niche, such as who your direct and indirect competitors are.
Conducting stakeholder interviews is essential to gathering deeper insights. Speaking with key team members, such as marketing managers, product owners, or customer support representatives, helps uncover specific pain points and business priorities.
UX Audit Process In Detail
How to do a website UX audit? There are five main steps in a web design audit: defining objectives and scope, data analysis, identifying problems using various techniques, and offering solutions based on the analyzed data. Let’s learn more about them step by step.
Define the Objectives and Scope
Before starting the audit, you need to set goals and determine why you need it. For example, we usually call our client in advance to discuss all the business details.
At this stage, you need to decide why you need an audit, what results you want to achieve, and for which parts of the site or sites (if you have multiple ones) to conduct the audit.
All the information we discussed above will help here: actionable feedback, site analytics, a customer journey map, and so on. The work at this stage should be done jointly so that you understand what you will receive in advance. For example, if we receive a request to improve the site’s conversion, we focus on checkout and user behavior of your digital product.
Data Analysis
At this stage, the specialist reviews all the data the client collects. It includes conducting a detailed analysis of competitors and user personas, examining previous UX audits, and evaluating website performance metrics from Google Analytics. This review helps determine the best methods for rating the site’s user experience and identifying key issues.
At this stage, the UI/UX audit tools to be used for the research are decided. For example, usability heuristics, stakeholder interviews, and usability tests can be used to track everything from the user’s perspective.
Problem Identification
Conducting UX audits, there are several techniques to analyze navigation and user behavior in different scenarios. We will discuss three of the most common methods used widely during a UX audit.
Usability Testing Through Research Methods
It’s easy to find a website’s problem when looking for usability issues. That’s why the next step is user research and analysis to understand the level of user satisfaction. All the methods are divided into six categories of website audit UX tools. Let’s compare them and see what the difference is.
Qualitative and Quantitative
Qualitative data focuses on understanding user experiences by capturing subjective insights. User testing explores motivations, emotions, and behaviors through interviews, observations, and open-ended feedback.
Quantitative data, on the other hand, involves gathering numerical data to identify patterns and measure trends. It aims to quantify user actions and preferences, offering statistical insights that can be applied more broadly.
Attitudinal and Behavioral
Attitudinal research reveals what users say. It explores their opinions, preferences, and beliefs through running surveys, user interviews, and questionnaires to perform UX audits.
Behavioral research shows how users interact with a store. It uses usability testing, eye tracking, and heatmaps to observe actual user actions and identify usability issues.
Generative and Evaluative
Generative research focuses on sparking new ideas and uncovering user insights to shape the design process. It involves creative activities, such as brainstorming sessions among UX designers, card sorting, and co-design workshops with users. The goal is to explore possibilities and inspire user-centered solutions.
Evaluative research tests how well existing designs or prototypes perform. Using it, an auditor identifies strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This phase often includes A/B testing, usability testing, and analyzing user feedback, among other practices, to confirm that the design meets user needs.
An auditor can combine these methods to gather information on user behavior and provide precise website improvement recommendations.
Heuristic Evaluation
One essential part of a digital product audit is the heuristic evaluation. In the 90s, Jakob Nielsen developed 10 usability heuristics for interaction design that experts must follow during a UX review. They stand out as general standards that a site must follow. According to these principles, any website should:
- Keep users updated with precise, real-time status messages.
- Use familiar language that reflects real-world terms and concepts.
- Let users undo actions and recover from mistakes quickly.
- Stay consistent with words, icons, and design patterns to avoid confusion.
- Prevent errors by avoiding risky situations or warning users before they proceed.
- Make options easy to spot so users don’t rely on memory.
- Speed up tasks with shortcuts for experienced users.
- Keep it simple by showing only essential information.
- Explain errors clearly with direct solutions.
- Provide clear, searchable instructions for fixing issues.
These tips can help you identify why user frustration may occur and understand the product’s user experience.
Design System Evaluation
Design system evaluation is another component that ensures consistency between visual and interactive elements. This covers the effectiveness of design patterns, branding elements, button styles, colors, font usage, and overall visual coherence.
Accessibility
Finally, accessibility is assessed to check if the website is usable by people with disabilities. It includes checking for proper contrast ratios, alt text on images, and compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
What does a UX audit report look like?
First, let’s talk about duration. On average, it takes 4 – 40 hours to perform. If this is a website user experience audit for a small store that needs to identify several problems, it will take one working day with visualization of solution examples.
The deadline can be calculated more accurately when the techniques used during the site audit are determined. For instance, if any participants require more advanced analytics, it will take much longer.
After getting a UX/UI audit report highlighting the key issues affecting your ecommerce store’s usability, design, and accessibility. It will include clear, actionable recommendations to improve the shopping experience and boost conversions.
You’ll receive a digital UX audit presentation, covering:
- Problems identified: The key usability challenges.
- Techniques used: The methods we applied to find the issues.
- Solutions offered: Clear recommendations and their impact on your store.
- Goal alignment: Steps to help you reach your business objectives.
- User fixes: Practical ways to meet customer needs and improve their experience.
A UX audit gives you the insights to make data-driven improvements that turn more visitors into loyal customers. You can see a website UX audit template below.
What Results You’ll Get
Removing barriers and streamlining navigation makes the store more manageable for everyone, resulting in higher engagement and more completed purchases.
Running a UX audit regularly is essential for keeping your store effective. As user expectations, technology, and market trends change, ongoing audits help you catch new issues early and stay competitive.
The frequency of UX audits depends on the size and complexity of your store. Stores that frequently update, add new features, or expand product lines should conduct audits more often to maintain a smooth and consistent user experience.
Example of Successful UX Audit
The BelVG team offers only UX audit services, followed by development and optimization after the audit. Over the past 15 years, we have worked with various clients and handled multiple requests for their businesses.
We conducted a small study, during which we found out how auditing and optimizing the site affected its statistics. Here are some figures:
- Boosted Google Performance Score up to 90+
- Improved visit duration 4 times
- Increased revenue and its stable growth
Let’s look at the example of our client websites and how the UX audit helped them boost conversion.
Zizzz
Zizzz is a family-owned Swiss brand that manufactures and sells sleeping bags, blankets, and duvets, mainly for children. The client had a multistore on Magento 1, and they were ready to upgrade with our help. Let’s learn what we offered Zizzz to change in their website design.
Zizzz Case Study
Learn more about the Conversion boost Zizzz website got after UX audit and improvements
Learn moreHome Page
Auditing the homepage was crucial since it’s the first thing visitors see. A clear, user-friendly design improves the shopping experience. Here’s what has been done for improvement:
- moving the title text near the CTA button on the mobile
- changing the place of the review block on the mobile
- arranging the cards in the featured product block in four columns to show the premium, uniqueness, and quality
- making the footer and subscribe block more compact, so the user does not have to look for the required functionality all over the screen of the device
Category Page
Improving the category page makes navigation easier and helps users find products faster. Key areas for improvement include:
- more space in the product cards and shorter text descriptions for cleanliness and readability
- multiple reviews and a “View all reviews” button for the information, to avoid overloading the page
- fixing the filter block at the top of the page and enlarging some filtering blocks for better interaction on the small screens of a mobile device
- possibility to select several parameters in the filter section to make a general filtering acceptable to users
Product Page
The product page directly impacts conversions, so it needs to be clear, engaging, and easy to navigate. We identified several ways to improve the user experience and drive sales:
- add the “form” symbol to show that the price varies depending on the parameters
- remove the preview images and use the designation of the presence of additional photographs instead
- make product size variations bigger to avoid click conflict during user interaction
- place the promotion block above the description and highlight it visually so more users will notice it
Cart Page
A well-structured cart page helps reduce abandoned orders and ensures a smooth checkout process. We identified several ways to improve usability and make the experience more seamless for customers:
- made stylistic changes for the code discount, the gift option, the page refresh button, the functionality for deleting a position, and changing a position
- added delivery information in the order summary information field so that a user does not worry about additional payments
- changed the fill colors for user notifications using color schemes
- moved up the cart item on the mobile version
- added the functionality of hiding products for faster access to the summary information block on the mobile version
Checkout Page
A complicated checkout process leads to abandoned carts, especially when payment options or shipping details are unclear or missing. To prevent this, we identified ways to improve the process:
- removed the two-step checkout process, as it had no functional value, and arranged the fields logically
- added more information about the purchased product in the adaptive version for users to check the correctness of their orders before completing them
- included an indication of each payment method, allowing users to find their preferred method more easily.
Blog Page
The blog page is an essential tool for engaging customers and driving traffic, but it needs to be easy to navigate and visually appealing. Here’s what we offered to do:
- make the search function more convenient by adding the date of publication and its title only
- give a featured news block a title, make the visual part a bit bigger, and add the date of publication
- shorten the description of a block of posts down to 4-5 lines to make the page of the block clearer
- move auxiliary blocks up in the form of drop-down blocks in the adaptive version
You can read more about which of these suggestions we’ve implemented and how the Zizzz website looks here! Now to the statistics: after our collaboration, the store generated $1,5M in annual revenue growth, the visit duration increased to 40 minutes from 10, and users checked an average of six pages per visit.
UX Website Audit For Your Company
Statistics show that 91% of dissatisfied customers don’t complain about their lousy experience but leave a store without providing feedback. A professional UX audit thoroughly and reliably evaluates the usability and performance of your eCommerce store.
We’re a website UX audit company with proven experience in helping Ecommerce stores. Our experts find what makes your website hard to use and show you how to fix it. You’ll get a clear review of your store’s user experience and simple, practical recommendations. Once the changes are made, you can expect better engagement and more conversions as your store grows.
Download our UX Audit Checklist and self-check your store
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