Ensuring that user experience (UX) is up to scratch must be a priority. And if you don’t scrutinize this carefully, your product could have a major flaw which goes overlooked.

By carrying out a UX audit, you’ll be able to weed out worrisome elements which are hampering usability, and bring about game-changing improvements. Here’s how to handle this process, and why it matters.

Establish Organizational Goals

First off, setting goals for the business and knowing how these apply from a usability perspective is helpful.

That way, you can understand where the product fits into this, and be in a better position to decide where it is falling short.

Explore User Needs

If you don’t know what your users want out of a product, then you can’t hope to help them. Narrowing down your target demographic and getting to know them intimately is at the core of UX auditing, as well as product development more generally.

You can do this through user interviews, as well as getting your info from other forms of feedback. For example, with HelpSpot email ticketing software, you’ll be able to track and troubleshoot concerns that people have raised, and extract insights from this data to determine who is using your product, and how.

Study Interactions

If you’re developing an app, there are analytical tools to harness that will show you how people are using the software. This will indicate if there are any bottlenecks in terms of user-friendliness, or even some elements that you expected to be impactful but which are in fact not seeing very much engagement.

Only by assessing interactions can you tell if the UX is building towards your organization’s goals as well as meeting the needs of users.

Experiment In-House

You don’t just have to rely on user feedback to audit the UX, as it’s often helpful to put yourself in the shoes of a typical user and dive into the product with this perspective in mind.

Being mindful of your own experience, and recording evidence of any stumbling blocks you come across, will further fuel your evaluations and could uncover revelations that would otherwise have stayed hidden.

Make Conclusions and Suggest Solutions

With all the research and data collected and collated, you need to evaluate what you’ve found, draw actionable conclusions from this and then indicate a path forwards to enhance UX.

Clarity is key here, especially if you’re working on a product’s usability for a third party. If you can’t express a solution clearly, it might not be the right one in the first place.

Establish Your Own Framework

We’ve gone over a broad set of examples for how UX auditing can be applied, but you have to bear in mind that your own products might require a different approach. In this case, it makes sense to use this standard framework as just that; the underpinnings for your own, bespoke UX audit strategy.

Documentation of the best practices you settle on is crucial. You don’t want to become the only person who knows how things are done, so write everything down and liaise with colleagues to find out if they’re happy with the tactics in play.

Final Thoughts

The best time to carry out a UX audit is obviously prior to the launch of the product, since that way any bugs can be dealt promptly.

However, user experience quality is not a static metric, but one which can change over time, so reviewing usability post-launch and implementing improvements will be an impressive and impactful step to take.