When running an ecommerce website, you automatically know that visitors find your business site through a search engine, and they get to interact with your homepage. Note that 77% of companies regard poor UX as a significant weakness to their clients.
Once you realize that visitors interact with your site and don’t convert, you need to find out the reason behind this aspect. This might be the best time that you need to update the hierarchy of information on your business website.
Research has revealed that most user flows have a problem, thus affecting the rate of conversion. Leave alone all this guesswork while dealing with your business website. What do you think needs to be done to identify the specific problem, and how can it be solved?
A user experience audit is the best way to help you identify the exact areas of your digital product and the parts of the business website that require changes. The UX audit uses empirical methods to expand the situation at hand when doing financial audits.
Note the ultimate goal of ecommerce website UX audit is to help you boost the conversion rate and make it easier for visitors to convert, contributing to the growth of the business. Besides, the audit should be aligned with your business goals to enhance consistent growth.
What is a Website UX Audit?
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Even though UX audit has a major impact on the success of a business, many people still do not understand what it is and how it is done. A website UX audit evaluates a business website to identify areas that need changes and their possible solutions.
The main goal of doing this is to identify possible usability problems concerning the specific digital product and business performance in general. Also, it can aid in identifying problematic places that make visitors abandon the process and leave the website.
In some cases, the UX audit might reveal that users lack information about the products displayed on the page. Also, the payment methods might be limited, thus limiting visitors from different localities across the target market.
Ecommerce Website UX Audit Checklist
This article incorporates a rich source of information that will walk you through the Ecommerece UX audit checklist. Let’s get into details!
1- Understand Your Business
The first step in a website UX audit is understanding the kind of business you are operating. Understand the business’s key stakeholders and learn more about why the business was formed and an estimated number of competitors.
Evaluate how the business is focused on helping consumers solve their problems. You can easily accomplish this aspect by doing a simple survey from the surroundings and even the consumers to get a chance to learn more about their view on the business.
This will help you understand if the business is taking the right direction or not. The website needs to have all the information regarding the products and services with business objectives clearly defined for its well-being.
2- User Personas
Every business owner needs to understand their user personas to enhance the well-being of their businesses. You need to understand if the current users are within your target audience or not. Sometimes, you might realize that you are attracting the wrong audience.
Besides, there is usually a change in the demographic surrounding, which also needs to be included in the business website. Evaluate if the products and services offered by your business cater to your customer needs.
3- Creation of User Flows
The user pathways play a key role in understanding the pathways that need to be taken by users during the product buying journey. Once you have gained a deep understanding of the user flows, you can easily divide your customer experience into different categories.
These steps are the entry step and goodbye. The entry step is the introduction of the user to the products displayed on the business website. Note that a website has a series of entry steps that customers can use to access the products and services.
The goodbye stage refers to the customer’s last interaction with the products. This stage is correlated to the expected action that needs to be taken, by the consumer. The analysis states that most businesses that implement these steps succeed in business.
4- Understand Your Competitors
This is among the most prioritized website UX audit checklists. It is [obvious that all businesses across the industries have competitors. While doing your website audit, you need to understand more about your competitors to help you get your way to the helm of the industry.
You can understand your competitors by analyzing some of their products to identify basic similarities and possible differences between them and what you are offering. Also, shed more light on your competitor’s experience to gain more insights.
Out of the ten competitors surrounding your company, ensure you grasp the operational model of about seven competitors to be on a safer side. This increases your chances of success more than five times in the industry.
5- Understand the Current State of Your Business Website
It is crucial to understand your position in the business as you continue to audit your website. You can use different analytics tools to help you learn more about your performance and your business website’s position in the market.
Using analytical platforms also helps you understand your products’ performance depending on their designs and the development resources. This process gives small business owners incredible insights that enable them to make the required adjustments to their products.
6- Usability Heuristics
When doing your website UX audit, ensure that all the users know the current system status to make it easy to comprehend the impact of their interaction. Make use of simple language on the site to enhance interaction.
In addition, you can give the users the freedom to change their minds, thus giving them the freedom to redo, exit tasks, and even the flows. You can establish the back button on the user flows to give users the freedom of perusing through all corners of the company website.
7- Website Design
This is a critical feature on the audit checklist that makes visitors feel comfortable visiting your site. Auditors mainly focus on examining the analytics regarding customer interaction to figure out whether the website design is on point or not.
Remember that the website design has a significant impact on the user experience since it creates the first impression in the user’s mind. If the impression created by the website design is poor, it limits interaction chances.
By doing the website audit, the auditors can identify some of the major things affecting user experience on the website. A good user experience increases the traffic rate. This is because all prospects enjoy visiting places where they feel more comfortable.
8- Typography
There are many things on your company website that affect your site’s general interaction. Typography is a common thing that many people neglect, although it carries significant weight on the site’s well-being.
Things such as the text’s size and capitalization affect the website UX. The words displayed on the site need to be well organized and written to enhance decency and professionalism.
Remember that nobody has the time to read through a website that has poorly written and organized content. Every word needs to be written in the right way to portray a serious image for the business.
9- Information Architecture
Looking at your business website, you need to ensure that the information architecture has done a commendable job by enhancing consistency on navigation. When visitors open your business website, they need to peruse across the pages.
Enhancing consistency in navigation plays a central role in ensuring that users can open pages one after the other without experiencing any challenge. Also, it makes it easy for users to locate what they are looking for easily to increase the number of sales recorded.
10- Interactive Design
Interaction is an important aspect of any business website. When clients open up a particular company website that is highly interactive, they feel welcomed and get the urge to learn more about the business.
Your website needs to have an interactive design and a functional layout that attracts prospects to peruse through and make purchases. The design should give users an option to help them recover from possible errors easier.
Also, the site should have an easily accessible customer help center where prospects can get help while navigating across the pages. The help center needs to be highly responsive to avoid matters of wasting time.
11- Accessibility
The accessibility aspect is an important feature that small business operators tend to neglect. The auditors are responsible for checking if the fonts, color palette, and general color combination serve users with what they want to see.
The products displayed on the website should allow users to switch between white and dark modes depending on their preference. By enhancing accessibility, users can easily access specific components across the website and serve themselves.
This is one of the major problems affecting various business websites across the industries. The reality is that accessibility serves as the cornerstone of business success.
12- Product Data and Analytics
The auditors in charge of the process need to carry out analytics of the entire product and generate the final report regarding the website. This is a complex process since it requires technical skills and tools to gather the desired data.
At this point, you can use Google Analytics to help you get the entire job done and be guaranteed accurate results that you can use in decision making. The data generated is vital in helping the business owner understand more about the visitors’ interaction on the website.
Google Analytics generates reliable data that is 99% reliable depending on the business you are running and your objectives in the industry.
13- Branding and Messaging
Branding and messaging are crucial for any business that intends to secure a considerable number of customers. Every business needs to brand itself in a unique manner to make it stand out among the rest.
Auditors evaluate the messaging and branding of the business to ensure that the message and branding are perfectly aligned with products and services offered by a given business. Remember that branding identifies the identity of your business.
The message should be in line with the products displayed on the website. Also, you need to check on your choice of words to avoid annoying your target audience.
14- Complete the Design Review
The general design of your business site impacts the performance of your business. It is advisable to acquire about two or three auditors to review the entire design and deliver the required insights to propel the growth and enhance accuracy standards.
This checklist goes through all the best practices and the usability of the website to enhance a better experience among users. The insights generated from the review design have a sound impact on the flow of customers on the website and across the business environment.
15- Compile and Deliver the Final Takeaways
After gathering information from all the above website UX audits, the auditors need to come up with the final findings used by the business owner. The findings incorporate actionable insights meant to modify the business website to suit its audience.
The insights help change the products, services, and the entire business in general, depending on the customer’s needs. The auditors create an action plan that the business management team can understand and take the desired action.
The auditors’ insights need to be followed to the latter for the well-being and success of the business. The action plan should incorporate specific procedures and recommendations for the implementation of the desired modifications.
Benefits of Website UX Audit
1- You will Learn More About Users Behavior
When conducting a website UX audit, the procedure helps you to gain more insights about your users and their general behavior. You will get to learn about the performance of the products in helping consumers attain their goals in business.
The process offers a qualitative analysis of data that plays a significant role in helping small business owners comprehend how the consumers behave while perusing through the products displayed on the business website.
In addition, the audit goes further to analyze points that make customers exit the site without converting. This helps the company owners make prudent decisions and propel the business to greater heights.
2- You Will Compare Your Products with Competitors
Nothing is interesting, like getting a chance to evaluate what your competitor is doing. UX audit gives you a chance to analyze and compare your products with other competitive products from your competitors.
Furthermore, you get a chance to learn what other successful competitors did to be where they are in business. This helps you learn more about your weaknesses and how you can revamp different points of your products and the business.
By comparing your products with that of your close competitors, you can easily recognize the gaps available in the market, helping you secure potential market opportunities. Analysis has revealed that in a circle of five competitors two are performing better than the others.
3- You Will Increase Your Profit
After doing a UX audit, the process suggests various changes that you need to implement to enhance profitability. By implementing the given changes, you advance your value proposition and the general performance of your business.
Also, you will help users understand more about your products faster, making it easy to increase the rate of conversion. It helps streamline operations depending on the consumer needs, attracting more potential clients.
UX audit also increases customer satisfaction, bringing more customers on board, thus increasing the profit generated on a daily basis.
Final Takeaway!
The website UX audit process is not a walk in the park as t may sound. The process incorporates a series of technical aspects that needs to be strictly followed to evaluate the business performance. Researchers say that 57% of consumers cannot recommend a business with a poorly designed website. After the entire process is done, the auditors give suggestions and insights to modify the site depending on the findings.
