A User Experience (UX) Audit is a process used to identify underperforming areas of your ecommerce website or digital product. These are places 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.
You might be wondering if UX is really that important on your ecommerce website, especially in terms of business gains. In reality, 88% of users are less likely to return to a website where they had a bad experience. 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.
One of the UX best practices we’ll discuss later is Page Speed. Slow page speed costs retailers over £1.5 billion ($2 billion) in lost sales each year.
With this in mind, we’d like to provide you with 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, identifying actionable opportunities for improvement and delivering a better ROI.
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What You Learn From a UX Audit
Conducting a UX Audit not only uncovers problems on your website but also helps you to become more empathetic toward your users.
Instead of seeing the website through business-oriented eyes, you’ll start to see it the way your users do, and quickly recognise the hurdles and frustrations they come up against.
By conducting a UX Audit, you’ll also get to know your customers better and learn to predict their needs before they know about them themselves.
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. Instead, you’re making the most out of the users already on your website.
Conducting a UX Audit
We’ve created a handy 10 Point UX Audit checklist to structure your own ecommerce UX audit. Our 10 Point UX Audit Template covers 10 key areas to review on your ecommerce website. From visual aspects such as Design System Inconsistencies to technical, behind the scenes things like page speed and broken links.
1. Check General Usability
General web usability can be defined as the presentation of information & goals in a concise and understandable way.
Avoid ambiguity, place important content obvious places and make sure the entire website is compatible on all browsers & devices.
2. Run a Heuristic Analysis
A Heuristic Analysis is a way to review your site with 5 key points that cover 5 UX best practices. Using the 5 point review you gain a deeper understanding from the point of view of your users. Focusing on Relevancy, Clarity, Value, Friction, and Distraction, critically specific pages or areas and uncovering opportunities for improvement.
Use our handy template for conducting Heuristic Analysis including prompt questions.
3. Check & Fix Broken Links
Check for any broken links across your site that send users to error pages or incorrect pages when clicked. It is also vital that every link goes to the intended page to avoid confusing or frustrating your users.
For example, a link to women’s clothes should take the user to the women’s clothing category, not the contact page.
4. Identify Design System Inconsistencies
The Guardian is a great example of a design system – it covers a breadth and depth of elements as well as presents them in an appealing way to viewers.
According to UX design.cc ‘A Design System is the single source of truth which groups all the elements that will allow the teams to design, realize and develop a product.’ They streamline the entire design process for everyone involved in working on your website.
If your actual website starts to stray from what is detailed in your Design System, your users end up getting confused about whether they are in the right place.
If your website doesn’t look consistent across all pages, your users will start to become suspicious, lose trust, and potentially leave your site.
If you don’t yet have a Design System, we recommend conducting an audit of your ecommerce website to find every different instance of every visual element from buttons to typographic lockups. This allows you to identify any inconsistencies and streamline the visual appearance of your website.
A great example of a Design System is The Guardian; it covers a breadth and depth of elements as well as presents them in an appealing way to viewers.
5. Reduce Page Speed
53% of mobile site visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Slow page speed can quickly cause frustration for users, who will waste no time leaving your site to use a competitor instead.
You can easily rectify slow page speed by ensuring images are optimised for the web, and on WordPress sites, install plugins such as WP Rocket to improve page speed.
6. Improve Accessibility
Around 1 billion people live with some form of disability, accounting for 15% of the population. By making your website accessible, you allow a greater number of users to access your website.
This is not only important from a moral perspective but also improves the perception of your brand, showing you are inclusive and accommodating to all users regardless of physical, mental or cognitive ability.
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative offers in-depth information on how to assess your website’s accessibility and methods you can use to make it more accessible.
Some examples of accessibility include having images with alt text, sufficient contrast between background and font colours, and a clear structure of the content that can be used with a screen reader.
7. Keep Navigation & Information Architecture Consistent
To avoid confusing users, make sure your navigation is consistent throughout the site, but also allow for growth in the future.
Navigation best practice is to group related content, such as keeping useful information links like Contact, About and FAQ page links together.
8. Avoid Long Forms
Modern consumers, in particular mobile users, want speed and convenience. Therefore it is important to keep forms short and to the point.
Keep the number of required fields to a minimum and never ask for unnecessary information. The best practice is to keep forms to 3-5 fields long, and you can increase conversions by 50% when you reduce the number of fields from four to three.
You can help to manage your user’s expectations by avoiding ‘Submit’ buttons and instead of using ‘Send Message’ or ‘Sign Up’.
9. Make Errors Clear & Easy to Rectify
In an ideal world, your website would avoid errors from occurring in the first place, but this isn’t always possible. Instead, make it as clear and easy as possible to rectify them.
For example, when an error occurs on a form, show the error message close to the input field, explain what caused the error without using technical language and suggest how to quickly rectify the error.
An example of this is on the password creation stage of a form, use a checklist that updates in real-time when the user includes each of the required elements in their password.
10. Mobile UX
Currently, mobile users for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. With customer needs changing to speed and convenience, it’s vital that your website UX has been optimised for mobile.
This can involve altering layouts to suit smaller screen sizes, ensuring tap target sizes are sufficient, and utilising UI feedback through sounds, visuals and haptics to reassure users.
How to Use the Download and What to do Next
The 10 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.