User Experience / UX Audit Template: Free Download

UX Audit Template: Free Download

Andy Thorne
UX audit template

Updated: 6 Feb 2024

A User Experience (UX) Audit is a process used to identify underperforming areas of your ecommerce website. These are areas that cause headaches for your users and ultimately erode your sales.

Our free UX audit template helps to guide this process and make it less stressful to deal with.

Download Now: Free UX Audit Template

You might be wondering if UX is really that important on your ecommerce website, especially in terms of business gains.

When you take into consideration the fact that it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, giving users a positive experience on your website makes sense.

Also, 88% of users are less likely to return to a website where they had a bad experience.

With this in mind, we’ve created a free UX audit template, as well as a guide on what a UX audit is and the value it brings.

What is a UX Audit?

UX audits give you:

  • A structured way to critically and measurably evaluate your ecommerce website’s performance
  • A way to identify actionable opportunities for improvement and deliver a better ROI.

Haven’t got time to analyse your site? Get a free ux audit

What You Learn From a UX Audit

In summary, a UX Audit is a systematic examination of your website that helps you gain insights into the challenges your users face.

Uncovering User Problems:
One of the primary goals of a UX Audit is to identify issues and problems that users may encounter when interacting with your website.

These problems could range from minor annoyances to significant usability barriers.

By examining your website from a user’s perspective, you can pinpoint these issues and understand how they affect the user experience.

Seeing Your Website Through Users’ Eyes:
When conducting a UX Audit, you step into the shoes of your website’s users.

This means looking at your site from an objective standpoint, detached from any preconceived notions or biases you might have as a business owner, website manager or marketer.

It allows you to view the site as if you were a first-time visitor, which can reveal issues that might not be immediately apparent to those intimately familiar with the site.

Recognising Hurdles and Frustrations:
Through the audit process, you can quickly recognise the hurdles and frustrations that users encounter while navigating your website.

These hurdles could include confusing navigation, slow loading times, broken links, complex forms, or unclear calls to action.

Identifying these pain points is the first step toward addressing them and improving the overall user experience.

By approaching your site from the user’s perspective, you can identify and prioritise areas for improvement, ultimately leading to a more user-friendly and effective digital presence.

This process is essential for ensuring that your website meets the needs and expectations of your target audience.

The Business Value You’ll Gain From a UX Audit

Uncovering existing issues with the website and finding methods to improve the site will not only improve your customer’s user experience but will improve the conversion rate of the website, resulting in more sales and increased revenue.

For example, if you increase your ecommerce conversion rate from 0.5% to 1%, you could double your revenue without needing to spend additional money on marketing.

Improving your site’s UX, improves conversions, which makes the most out of the users already on your website.

This is otherwise known as CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation).

Running a UX / CRO Audit: How to Use the UX Audit Template

We’ve created a handy 3 Point UX Audit checklist to structure your own ecommerce UX audit.

Our 3 Point UX Audit Template covers 3 key areas to review on your ecommerce website.

You don’t need any analytics tools to run this audit, it’s based on 3 key principles (outlined below) which give you advice on what to identify:

1. Value – Communicating and Enhancing User Benefits:

Check if your website is communicating value to the user? Can we do better? Can we increase user motivation?

  • Clarity of Messaging: Assess whether your website effectively communicates the value proposition of your products or services. Look for clear and concise headlines, product descriptions, and value statements that convey the benefits to users.
  • Relevance of Content: Check if the content on your pages aligns with the user’s intent. Ensure that the information presented is tailored to the user’s needs and expectations. Irrelevant or overly technical information can confuse and deter users.
  • Call-to-Action (CTA) Clarity: Evaluate the visibility and clarity of your CTAs. Are they prominently displayed and easy to understand? Ensure that CTAs are persuasive and encourage users to take the desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up.
  • User Motivation: Consider how you can enhance user motivation. Are there incentives, offers, or benefits that could be highlighted more effectively to encourage conversions? Identify opportunities to increase user motivation to engage with your website.

2. Friction – Enhancing User Flow and Reducing Barriers:

What on the website is causing doubts and hesitations? What makes the process difficult? We can’t reduce friction entirely, we can only minimise it.

  • Accordion Evaluation: Assess if there are collapsing accordions used on the website. If so, suggest a more user-friendly layout to improve the user experience. Accordions can introduce friction by hiding essential information, potentially causing confusion.
  • Carousel Consideration: Examine whether the site employs rotating carousels. Recognize that carousels can create friction and result in a suboptimal user experience, especially as users advance through the carousel. Consider alternatives to enhance engagement.
  • Button Clarity: Review button labels for logical consistency. Ensure that labels clearly convey the intended actions, reducing user uncertainty and hesitation.
  • Product Filtering and Sorting: Evaluate the availability of product filtering and sorting options on product listing pages. Empower users to find products more easily by providing efficient sorting and filtering mechanisms.
  • Usability Assessment: Perform an overall assessment of the site’s usability. Identify areas where the site may pose challenges to users and work to streamline the user experience for greater ease of use.
  • Error Handling and User Guidance: Examine how the site handles errors. Check if it provides helpful guidance to users when errors occur, such as invalid email input or unsuccessful searches. Ensure that error messages are informative and lead users towards resolution or alternative actions.
  • Emergency Exit Strategy: Verify the presence of an ’emergency exit’ option for users who wish to undo or exit unwanted actions. Include features like “Undo,” “Cancel,” or “Exit” to give users a graceful way to backtrack or abandon actions without frustration.

3. Distraction – Maintaining User Focus:

What’s on the site that is not helping the user take action? Is anything unnecessarily drawing attention? If it’s not motivation, it’s distraction – so it might be a good idea to get rid of it.

  • Eliminating Extraneous Content: Identify and remove elements that divert users’ attention from their primary goals, such as unrelated advertisements or excessive pop-ups. Focus on content that matters most to users.
  • Simplified Visual Design: Prioritise clean and organised layouts that guide users’ attention to essential elements and reduce visual clutter. Enhance the visual hierarchy to keep users engaged.
  • Minimising Interruptions: Assess and minimize intrusive features or interruptions that disrupt the user experience. Make sure that interactive elements like autoplay videos or notifications are user-friendly and unobtrusive.
  • Optimised Loading Times: Speed up page loading times by optimizing images and reducing unnecessary scripts or plugins, preventing user frustration and maintaining a smooth browsing experience.

By diving deeper into these 3 key areas (Value, Friction, and Distraction) and addressing specific elements within each category, you can conduct a thorough UX audit and make informed decisions to enhance the overall user experience of your ecommerce website.

Examples: Watch a UX Audit in Action

If you learn better from seeing and watching examples, checkout 2 UX including video, which run through product pages for both Carharrt and Grind Coffee.

UX Audit of Grind Coffee Product Page

UX Audit for Carhartt Ecommerce Product Page

How to Use the Download and What to do Next

The 3 Point UX Audit Template is a comprehensive checklist covering each of the sections discussed above.

To get the most out of it, use the UX audit to structure an in-depth review of your website, on both mobile and desktop.

The items that you haven’t checked off will give you a list of areas to revisit and optimise.

You might also spark some discussion with your website team on other areas to improve.

The Importance of Website UX

As we’ve discussed in this blog, improving your website UX is beneficial for your users and in turn, will improve the performance of your website with higher revenue and improved performance.

We hope you find our UX audit template helpful in your journey to improve your website UX.

Still stuck? Request a free UX Audit

If you’re finding it challenging to pinpoint specific areas of improvement on your website, our expert team is here to help.
Request a free UX Audit and let us guide you towards a more user-friendly and effective website.

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