Ultimate Guide to a UX Audit for Your Digital Product: Artkai’s Best Practices

In a world where digital processes change so rapidly, it's crucial to ensure your business is user-friendly and customer-oriented. This is where a UX audit comes in. Whether you're a business with outdated products, a startup looking to scale, or an enterprise aiming to improve or merge multiple products, a UX audit is essential. 

Why? Because a UX audit evaluates a product's user experience and identifies areas that need improvement. As a result, businesses will see a boost in user satisfaction and faster achievement of their goals. UX audit also helps spot usability issues, enhances user engagement, and ensures smooth interactions with your digital product.At Artkai, we know how important a great user experience is for success. Our UX audit services help modernize old products, scale startups, and optimize enterprise solutions. In this article, we’ll present insights gathered from over 8 years of work with diverse businesses in the US and Europe. Based on our experience with UX audits for more than 50 products, we’ll explain what a UX audit is, why it matters, and how it can transform your digital products. Discover how a thorough UX audit can lead your product to success.

Understanding a UX Audit

A UX audit is a professional evaluation of your product's usability and user experience. It helps you understand what to improve to make your users happier. This audit is the first step in enhancing your product or service. By conducting a UX audit, our team identifies what slows down conversion growth and fixes issues to improve the product's UX, usability, and user satisfaction.

A UX audit is a detailed study conducted by our experts to assess the usability of a product's interface. It helps understand the dynamics of interaction between potential users and the product, determine the reasons for unsuccessful conversions, and develop a strategy to enhance the user experience. Through this process, we uncover the pain points and areas that need improvement, providing a clear path to optimize your product for better user engagement and satisfaction.

Key Exercises and Deliverables of a UX Audit by Artkai

Here are the main activities we usually do when conducting a UX audit for our clients with the deliverables they can expect (the list can be tailored according to the product type and audit goals and KPIs):

Stakeholder Interviews

We engage with stakeholders to understand business objectives, product goals, key performance indicators, and uncover real user needs. This helps align our audit with your strategic vision.

Deliverables: A project brief and documented goals and KPIs.

Market and Trends Analysis

We delve into your business industry and gather insights to identify current trends and market demands. This ensures your product stays competitive and relevant.

Deliverables: A comprehensive market analysis report and a trends overview.

Competitor Analysis

We analyze competitors’ products to identify best practices and areas for your product improvement. This gives you a clear edge in the market.

Deliverables: An analysis report with differentiation and UX enhancement opportunities.

Heuristic Evaluation

We conduct a detailed expert review of your product to identify usability flaws and areas not adhering to established usability principles.

Deliverables: A heuristic evaluation report and a list of usability flaws.

Usability Testing

We validate the usability of your product with real users to gather authentic feedback and insights.

Deliverables: A usability tests report.

User Research

We conduct comprehensive user research involving interviews, user surveys, and other methods to understand the needs and behaviors of your users deeply.

Deliverables: A user research report, user surveys findings, and interview insights.

Analytics Review

We analyze your product's interaction data to gain quantitative insights into user behavior and interactions.

Deliverables: An analytics review report.

Customer Journey Mapping

We build a Customer Journey Map (CJM) of the existing flow to analyze bottlenecks, weak touchpoints, and areas for improvement.

Deliverables: A customer journey map.

Hypothesis Formulation

We use interaction data to formulate hypotheses that guide our design decisions, ensuring they are data-driven and user-centric. Our report includes in-depth analytics, such as video recordings, heat maps, and UX research findings. These insights help you understand user interactions and identify key areas for improvement.

Deliverables: An analytics review report with hypotheses for redesign and concrete analytics data used for further design decisions. 

Prioritization and Roadmapping

We prioritize all UX improvements and develop a roadmap for implementing them, ensuring efforts are focused on the most impactful areas. This roadmap comes with a project estimation and a roadmap for the future UI/UX redesign, ensuring that your efforts are focused on the most impactful areas for improvement.

Deliverables: A prioritized backlog with a set of features and activities to be undertaken. 

Visual Presentation

We provide a visual presentation that highlights the most critical interface errors. This presentation includes screenshots and detailed recommendations for their elimination, giving you a clear path to enhance user experience and address usability issues.

Deliverables: A visual presentation with recommendations on what to improve.

Benefits of a UX Audit

A UX audit does a lot for businesses and improves numerous actionable metrics. It helps to:

Our UX Audit Services

Here you can explore user experience audit services that Artkai’s team provides: 

UX research

We are studying and understanding the needs, behaviors, attitudes, and motivations of users with the goal of improving the design and usability of a product or service. We’re focusing on preferences and pain points to let you create more user-centered products eventually.

Usability audit

Identifying usability issues: we evaluate how easy it is for users to complete tasks across the entire user journey, find information, and navigate your product or website.

Accessibility audit

Overseeing whether your website or app complies with accessibility standards and guidelines and whether users with disabilities can use it effectively.

Content audit

Evaluating the quality and effectiveness of the website or application content. It involves identifying issues with content structure, readability, and relevance.

Performance audit

Looking for speed and performance issues. Examining variables like network latency, server response times, and page load times are part of the process.

Visual design audit

Examining the visual design of a website or application. Providing an extra check for the layout, typography, color scheme, and overall website aesthetic.

Information architecture audit

The Artkai team evaluates the organization and structure of information on a website or application. It involves identifying issues with navigation, labeling, and categorizing content.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit

Identifying issues that may be preventing users from converting (e.g., making a purchase, filling out a form, etc.). It involves evaluating factors such as call-to-action design, the checkout process, and the user flow.

Artkai’s Available Packages

Case Studies: Successful UX Audits for Our Clients

ProCredit Bank - Digital ecosystem for a Banking group from Germany

About the project and business

Our client is a holistic fintech ecosystem, presented in 13 countries and included web platforms, mobile applications, websites, ATMs interfaces, and marketing assets. They needed to improve their UX within all these platforms and add new functionality to their product.

Development objectives and challenges

The biggest challenge lay in the complexity of the project, as we had to conduct hours of research, dozens of interviews with employees globally, and tough discussions with the IT department. Also, we had to align to the highest standards of security and compliance for all bank’s customers – private clients, institutional clients, and business owners. 

Development process

After a research phase, we reviewed a self-service portal for bank customers to ensure they can manage online their finances, accounts, reports, and bookkeeping, without any help from bank employees. 

Since there was a problem integrating NFC Wallet that included both Apple and Google Pay for some regions, we decided to build an analog of e-wallets inside the ProCredit mobile app. As a result, users can add cards to their wallets, manage them there, as well as pay in terminals using a mobile phone.

Also, we developed a Template builder tool for ProCredit bank managers globally based on a common database and guidelines. It helps keep all materials in one place and create marketing materials in a fast, flexible, and consistent manner.

Outcome

Our UX audit and Design System helped the client reduce cost and time to market for new products. As there’s no need to create wireframes, visual concepts, or UI kits anymore, the design system saves 50% of the time.

Redesign of the onboarding for the independent payment organization portal

About the project and business

DNA Payments Group is a leading omnichannel payments company in the UK and EU, serving over 65,000 merchants with cutting-edge payment solutions. The group includes nine companies, with offices in London, Kent, Hull, Manchester, and Oxford, as well as remote and field teams. 

Development objectives and challenges

We had to conduct a UX audit of the client’s platform to create an onboarding process that is quick, easy, and clear for the users. Also, we needed to build a mobile version of the platform to prevent users from being attached to their laptops at crucial moments. Then, after a comprehensive UX audit, our team had to redesign the current platform and build the missing points to provide a seamless user experience across desktop and mobile devices.

Development process

Our team started with thorough desk research to learn the project's domain and understand its field comprehensively. Next, we conducted interviews with key stakeholders to gain deeper insights into the portal and business. These interviews helped us understand common use cases and the specific needs and expectations of those involved with the project. Following this, we performed an audit of the current interface to identify critical usability issues. 

To better empathize with users, we created detailed personas. We then mapped out the customer journey, particularly focusing on key user interactions with the interface during the onboarding process.

With these insights, we prepared and prioritized a backlog. Our team then developed wireframes and a clickable prototype to redesign the onboarding user experience. 

Building on the wireframes and adhering to the platform’s visual guidelines, we created the visual design, starting with the desktop version. Given that most users accessed the platform through laptops, we prioritized this design first before moving on to the mobile version.

Outcome

As a result of our cooperation, the client got a comprehensive UX audit and UX & UI redesign for their DNA payments platform (both web and mobile), based on the audit. We simplified and improved the onboarding process for the new users to make it fast, easy, and clear. 

Re-inventing collaboration between enterprise pharma company & healthcare specialists

About the project and business

The leading healthcare enterprise with a 125-year history, Roche Switzerland, came to us with HCP Portal - a digital environment for medical specialists where they can find information about Roche products and all the possible supporting materials. The portal was outdated and had practical appliances for neither Roche representatives nor medical specialists.

Development objectives and challenges

We had to identify the reason for the low traffic on the portal and come up with a strategy for its increase.

Development process

Our team began by interviewing around 15 project stakeholders to understand the portal's issues from different perspectives and identify common themes. We then engaged in live communication with users interested in the portal's development to empathize with common use cases and gain valuable insights.

During the quarantine lockdown, we held an interactive online session with over 30 participants over several days. These sessions focused on identifying potential improvements and growth directions for the portal. Our team analyzed the collected analytics data to diagnose the current solution's pain points and proposed a redesign strategy based on real user data.

In the final stage, we transformed our findings into concrete, actionable steps for the redesign, forming the components of our backlog.

Outcome

Based on the UX audit results, the client received a comprehensive strategy to increase portal traffic and improve usability based on thorough stakeholder and user research. This led to actionable steps for redesigning the HCP Portal, making it more practical and engaging for Roche representatives and medical specialists.

Redesign of the investment company's corporate website

About the project and business

Halo provides access to protective investments, including Structured Notes, buffered ETFs, and annuities. It is the first platform that enables advisors to create custom Structured Notes.  With over $12.5B in transactions since its founding in 2015.

Development objectives and challenges

Artkai had to design a new visual style for the company based on its new market positioning, update the website structure, and redesign all pages with updated content. Also, we had to refresh the visual style across all company branding materials, from pitch decks to printing materials.

Development process

During the project, our team designed a Company Overview with information about Halo Investing, its mission, and the services it offers. Also, we created Product Offerings with details about Halo's innovative financial products, such as the Halo Platform, index options, and other structured investment products. In Investment Solutions, we included information about the investment solutions Halo provides, tailored to meet the unique needs and preferences of investors. We also added Educational Resources with articles, blogs, or resources to help investors understand structured products and make informed decisions.

Outcome

The client received a new visual style and an updated website structure that aligns with Halo's new market positioning. Additionally, we refreshed all branding materials, enhancing the overall presentation and user experience of Halo's platform and services.

Wrapping up

A thorough UX audit can significantly enhance your digital products, leading to increased user satisfaction, improved usability, and higher conversion rates. By identifying and addressing user pain points, a UX audit ensures a seamless user experience that stands out in a competitive market. At Artkai, we specialize in conducting comprehensive UX audits tailored to your unique business needs.

Our team of experts is dedicated to helping you modernize outdated products, scale your startup, or optimize your enterprise solutions. Ready to transform your digital experience?

Contact us to learn more about our UX audit services and how we can help your business succeed.